Gerontological study on voting behavior of the elderly in aged society with falling birthrate and shrinking population

2014 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 23653124
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Sociology
• Research Institution: Kobe University
• Principal Investigator: ODA Toshikatsu 神戸大学, 人間発達環境学研究科, 名誉教授 (90124536)
• Project Period (FY): 2011-04-28 – 2015-03-31
• Keywords: 老年学 / 投票行動 / 高齢者 / 少子高齢・人口減少社会 / 選挙 / 政治参加 / 世代間対立 / 政治的関心

Outline of Final Research Achievements

The voter turnout of older people is always higher than other age groups regardless of local or national election. The progress of aging of population and declining birthrate are rapidly increasing the percentage of such older people among electorate. I habe been interested in this social phenomenon and have tried to investigate whether their voting behavior has significant impact on political and social issues or not. In this study, I analyzed the data on 1,474 participants obtained from mail survey for 4,000 adult males and females selected by random sampling. The strongest factor of political participation is old age per se, and political efficacy has mediative effect between political participation and sosio-demographic factors. Political efficacy and political participation except for voting of older people were not much different from other generations, and conflictive attitudes between generations were not found.

Free Research Field

社会学