2006 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
A New Approach for Estimating the Policy Positions of Parties and Districts Based on the Spatial Voting Theory‥‥Theoretical and Empirical Analysis
| Project/Area Number |
17530097
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
Politics
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| Research Institution | University of Tsukuba |
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Principal Investigator |
KISHIMOTO Kazuo University of Tsukuba, Graduate School of Systems and Information Engineering, Professor, 大学院システム情報工学研究科, 教授 (90136127)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2005 – 2006
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| Keywords | spatial voting theory / policy location / Pro urban interest vs. anti scale / election issue / national election of Japan / global optimization / number of votes / national election of England |
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| Research Abstract |
I point out that the empirical Downsian policy locations of political actors in an election are naturally determined from the number of votes gained by the parties (candidates). I developed a system for carrying out this calculation. I applied it to the national elections of Japan and England (i.e., a part of the United Kingdom.). The results show that the main issues of elections in the Downsian sense are urban=rural conflicts and the jobless problem, respectively, in Japan and in England. In the case of Japan, the result shows that the ideology is not the main factor of the election if we take the Downsian frame.
In my approach, however, there are several technical problems.
First, global optimization of a function in a high dimensional space is needed, so that one must be very careful in getting the correct global optimum. In this research I succeeded in getting seemingly correct solution to this problem within a acceptable computation time.
Second, an a priori assumption on the shape of density on each district is needed in my approach. As a first approximation, I use the normal density. A natural question here is whether the result is sensitive to the choice or not. I checked that the results remains almost as it is if we change the t-distribution instead of the normal.
Third, we use no prior information on the policy of parties. Thus it is possible that the order of parties changes unstable over time caused by noises or factors other than the Downsian mechanisms. I found that the results are very stable over time both in Japan and in England.
Thus my approach is now practically applicable to national elections.
In the process of research, I encountered a trouble of the lack of election data. Thus I arranged the database which is open to public. One can access the data through internet. It is another contribution of this research.
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