2002 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
Research on Political Trust and Political System Support in Japan
| Project/Area Number |
13620107
|
|---|
| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
|
| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
|---|
| Section | 一般 |
|---|
| Research Field |
Politics
|
|---|
| Research Institution | Waseda University |
|---|
Principal Investigator |
TANAKA Aiji School of Political Science and Economics, Professor, 政治経済学部, 教授 (40188280)
|
|---|
| Project Period (FY) |
2001 – 2002
|
| Keywords | Political distrust / Political System Support / Political Attitudes / Public Opinion Data Analysis / Generation Gap / System Support |
|---|
| Research Abstract |
This research aimed to examine attitudes of the ordinary Japanese voters toward Japan's political system by analyzing the public opinion survey data and the aggregated election data. This research analyzed those data from 1970s to the early 2000s, and tried to detect causal factors to generate system support attitudes among Japanese.
Those data sets utilized for this research were (1) JABISS data 1976, (2) JES data 1983, (3) JES II data 1993, (4) JEDS96 data 1996, (5) JDES2000 data 2000, (3) JSS2001 data 2001.
The major findings of this research are following three points. First, the general political trust of the Japanese public was originally relatively low (about 40%), but its level sharply went down (down to 11.1%) from 1996 to 2000. The level of the Japanese political trust has not quite come back to the original level, even after Prime Minister Koizumi gained extremely high popularity from spring to autumn 2001.
Second, the Japanese public attitudes toward democratic institutions, such as election system, the Diet, and political parties, were very supportive in the 1970s through the middle of the 1990s (about 70% to 80%). However, these supportive attitudes toward democratic institutions (namely, democratic system support) also sharply declined (down to 25 to 30%), but they did not come back to the original level even in autumn 2001.
Third, we found generational difference in political trust through our cohort analyses, but we did not find any generational effects on Japanese attitudes toward democratic institutions (system support).
|
