Protest Voting without Protest Parties? Japanese Electoral Behavior during COVID

• In Event: Partisan Politics and Policymaking in Japan

Abstract

Studies exploring the so-called protest voting hypothesis tend to share the assumption that voters’ disaffection from politics implies support for ‘protest’ (i.e., anti-establishment) political actors. Over time, this has resulted in an increasing scholarly focus on political actors explicitly aiming at mobilizing citizens’ grievances toward the political system. Yet this approach has so far neglected contexts lacking evidently protest parties. This paper reconsiders the often-applied framework of protest voting by extending it to countries where self-evident ‘protest’ political actors do not exist. We show in our theoretical discussions and empirical analyses in this paper how important it is to apply the concept of ‘protest voting’ to virtually every political actor and assess the degree to which protest voting matters in fostering party support. The implications of failing to apply ‘protest voting’ models to other hidden cases are not negligible and we demonstrate them in this paper.

With the above aim in mind, Japan is selected as a case to demonstrate the relevance of extending protest voting models to any political actor that may not be perceived as ‘protest’ political actors. Japan serves as an ideal case for this purpose as few political actors and parties are recognized as protesting ones. We show the relevance of our approach in applying protest voting to different parties in comparing the pre-covid19 and the post-covid19 periods. As the recent pandemic has led to an increasing dissatisfaction with the government’s handling of uncertain situations (see e.g., Pekkanen, Reed and Smith, 2021), and it is pertinent to compare ‘protest voting’ before and after the pandemic. Japan proves to be once again an ideal case for our inquiry as the country experienced three national elections just before and after the outbreak of covid19. Namely, Upper House elections were held in July 2019 and 2022, while a Lower House election was held in October 2021. We have conducted original online surveys in occasion of each of these elections and our empirical investigations will be based on these novel datasets.

In this paper we aim at covering the gap by performing a comprehensive assessment of how protest considerations affect electoral calculus among Japanese voters vis-à-vis other mainstream predictors of electoral choice. To conduct our analyses of protest voting, we reshape our data in the so-called stacked form, meaning that the data is restructured in the form of individual x parties. Our main expectation is that increasing disappointment toward the government’s performance in handling the pandemic in-between the two elections might have resulted into an increasing explanatory relevance of protest considerations as drivers of electoral choice in the country.

Authors

• Lewis Alexander Luartz, Chapman University

• Stefano Camatarri, Autonomous University of Barcelona

• Marta Gallina, Autonomous University of Barcelona

• Airo Hino, Waseda University