Gender, Generational Cohorts, and Political Participation in Japan

• In Event: When We Were Young: Gender, Age, and Politics

Abstract

Do generational cohort effects on participation differ between women and men of developed democracies? Scholars concur that generational cohort effects are typically shaped by “formative experiences.” Robert Putnam and others have pointed to the experience of mobilization during World War II as the “formative experience” that led the “greatest generation” to participate at especially high rates throughout the course of their lives, while others such as M. Kent Jennings have stressed the 1960s protests as propelling the particularly high levels of participation among the baby-boomer generation. Still others have noted that individuals who come of age at the specific moment of democratization or enfranchisement become more participatory than members of preceding cohorts. But women and men may be differentially exposed to such “formative” historical events. This study draws on a longitudinal dataset that has recently become available, the Survey on Japanese Value Orientations (1973-2013), to examine whether, and to what extent, gender differences in generational cohort effects exists. Age-period-cohort analyses using the cross-classified random effects model (CCREM) indeed yields evidence of different generational cohort effects between Japanese women and men, with the “greatest generation” marking the peak of participation among Japanese men but the baby-boomers participating at the highest levels among Japanese women. This difference may be attributed to the fact that men have historically been much more extensively mobilized into the military, whereas women’s mobilization has been more into the “home front.” The large cohort effects among women of the baby-boomer generation, who witnessed democratization and the student protests during their “impressionable years,” in turn highlight the greater degree of liberalization that women experienced in these periods relative to men. The study points to the importance of considering different experiences that individuals who belong to different sub-cohorts may have encountered during their “impressionable years.”

Author

• Rieko Kage, University of Tokyo