political interest or interest in politics?
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Political Interest or Interest inPolitics?Dennis Patterson a & Misa Nishikawa ba Texas Tech University , USAb Ball State University , USAPublished online: 15 Oct 2008.
To cite this article: Dennis Patterson & Misa Nishikawa (2002) Political Interest orInterest in Politics?, Women & Politics, 24:2, 1-34, DOI: 10.1300/J014v24n02_01
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ARTICLES
Political Interest or Interest in Politics?Gender and Party Support in Postwar Japan
Dennis Patterson, Texas Tech UniversityMisa Nishikawa, Ball State University
ABSTRACT. Like politics in other advanced democracies, Japanesepolitics is characterized by distinct differences in the behavior of menand women. For example, Japanese women manifest distinct partisanpreferences that contrast with those of Japanese males. Most explana-tions for such gender differences in Japan involve the manner in whichpolitics at the national level contrasts with traditional Japanese femaleroles, which combine to make Japanese women less interested in andmore distant from politics than Japanese males. In this paper, we showthat the political behavior of Japanese women has evolved throughoutthe postwar period in a way that renders traditional views of the gender gapin Japan suspect. Instead, we show that it is the distinctive issue preferences ofJapanese females that lead to their specific patterns of party support and rejec-tion. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Ser-vice: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: <[email protected]>Website: <http://www.HaworthPress.com> © 2002 by The Haworth Press, Inc.All rights reserved.]
Women & Politics, Vol. 24(2) 2002http://www.haworthpressinc.com/store/product.asp?sku=J014
2002 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved. 1
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It is a long-held belief that, in Japan, politics at the national level“ . . . remains one of the firmest bastions of male dominance” (Iwao1993, 214; see also Aoki 1991). A variety of reasons have been offeredfor this state of affairs, most of which focus on gender roles, particularlyhow traditional female roles inherited through Japan’s unique historyand culture keep Japanese women out of politics. To be sure, part of thegender gap in Japan has been attributed to the fact that the socio-eco-nomic resources that are necessary to become active in politics are lessavailable to Japanese women, but the other part of it has focused on sub-jective factors, that is, the attitudes that motivate and influence Japanesewomen in their political behavior.1 According to a survey of Japanesewomen by the Prime Minister’s Office, “Japanese women . . . see poli-tics as a remote, alien realm, a world of power mongering, influencepeddling, and corruption–in short, a filthy occupation that has no rela-tion to their lives and values.”2 Such attitudes and influences cause Jap-anese women to be relatively uninterested in politics, unsupportive ofcertain Japanese political parties, and, thus, unable to obtain the level ofbenefits from the political process that Japanese males typically obtain.
To be sure, modern Japanese politics has been influenced by uniquecultural, historical, and socio-economic conditions that have been gen-erally unfriendly to gender equality, and, because of this, it is no sur-prise that postwar Japanese politics is characterized by a significantgender gap. On the other hand, there are two characteristics of the gen-der gap in Japan that make it curious, especially in light of how it hastraditionally been accounted for by Japan specialists. The first of thesestems from the idea that, despite the comparatively unique historicaland cultural conditions that have molded Japanese politics, differencesin the political behavior of Japanese women and men are not entirelyunlike what one finds in other democratic nations. The gender gap in Ja-pan, like elsewhere in the developed world, manifests itself in the formof differences in levels of political participation, contrasting policypreferences, and gender-specific patterns of party support.3 Moreover,gender gap researchers have found that a lack of interest in politics onthe part of women helps reinforce their feelings of distance from the po-litical world and, thus, partially explains their distinctive patterns of po-litical behavior.4
The second of these has to do with how the gender gap in Japan hasevolved throughout the postwar period, something that is important notsimply because the gender gap has changed in other democratic nationsas well, but more importantly because the changes that occurred forceus to rethink how the gender gap in Japan has been understood in the
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first place (see e.g., Kaufman and Petrocik 1997; Norrander 1999;Shapiro and Mahajan 1986; Wirls 1986). The principal reason for this isthat Japanese women have become more politically active throughout thepostwar period, and, from time to time, their increased activism has had aprofound impact on national political outcomes. For instance, some Ja-pan watchers have noted that it was the activism of women that helped theenvironmental movement in Japan gain the momentum it sustained in the1970s and that it was Japanese women who were the power behind theanti-consumption tax movement of the 1980s (see e.g., Iwao 1993;McKean 1981; and Uno 1993). Some scholars and journalists even ar-gued that the Liberal Democratic Party’s (LDP) loss of its House ofCouncillors majority in 1989 was largely due to the voting behavior ofJapanese women (see e.g., Lesbriel 1990). Indeed, many assessments ofthis election ended with the suggestion that the events leading to this Up-per House contest inaugurated a new “age of women” in Japanese politicssymbolized by the selection of Takako Doi as the head of the Japan So-cialist Party (JSP) in 1986, the first time in Japan’s history that a womanhad been selected to head a major political party (see e.g., Iwao 1993).5
These two characteristics of the gender gap in postwar Japan presentus with a conundrum in that, if the gender gap is explained by a lack offemale interest in and attachment to the world of politics, then thechanges that define the gender gap’s postwar dynamics should neverhave occurred. In other words, how is it that Japanese women are differ-ent from men in terms of their lack of interest and involvement in poli-tics but, at the same time, have become more active in politics andsometimes impacted greatly on its course? Arguing that Japanesewomen are generally distant from politics but that they sometimes be-come purposively active and deeply involved in the political process isnot a satisfactory solution to this problem. This is because it requires usto understand those incidences of more active female participation inJapanese politics as being deviant from their larger tendency to be lessinterested and less involved in politics than Japanese males. In otherwords, it does not really explain those patterns that define the politicalbehavior of Japanese women.
The best approach to this intellectual problem involves nothing shortof a thorough explanation for the gender gap in postwar Japan, and ourpurpose in this paper is to provide such an explanation. The explanationwe offer here proceeds from the notion that the gender gap is an evolv-ing phenomenon in postwar Japan that is explained by the political pref-erences of Japanese females. This is quite different from existingexplanations of the gender gap in Japan because it rejects the idea that
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the patterns of political participation and party support that distinguishJapanese females from their male counterparts are not due to the formerbeing less interested in politics than the latter. Rather, in this paper weshow that gender differences are a function of a rationally-based, pur-posive decision on the part of Japanese females either to become politi-cally active when such action serves their interests or to refrain frompolitical activities when such efforts do not serve their interests.
To demonstrate that this idea helps solve the Japanese gender gap co-nundrum, we must complete a number of tasks. These tasks involveshowing that the patterns of party support that separate Japanese menfrom Japanese women are not due to a lack of interest on the part of thewomen. Rather, we must demonstrate that Japanese females are lesssupportive of certain political parties because those parties do not repre-sent the values and issues that Japanese women consider important.Supporting this idea requires that we show that there are certain politi-cal parties that Japanese women have come to support in the postwarperiod and that this is because such parties are attentive to problems thatJapanese females feel are important. In light of this, our overall purposeis to demonstrate that the policy and partisan preferences of Japanesefemales contrast with those of their male counterparts. Even when wecontrol for those factors that are typically related with party support pat-terns, we see that the policy preferences of Japanese women remain atthe core of their distinctive partisan choices.6
MAPPING THE GENDER GAP IN POSTWAR JAPAN
The political behavior of Japanese females and males has alwaysbeen different in the postwar period, but the gender gap that such behav-ioral differences created has changed as the postwar period progressed.Because of this, the manner in which the political behavior of Japanesewomen contrasted with that of Japanese men was dramatically differentin the 1980s and 1990s than it was earlier in the postwar period. This isan important point because most explanations for the political behaviorof Japanese women, those stressing their lack of interest in politics andconsequent propensity for being apolitical, are utterly inconsistent withpatterns of behavior that have come to define the gender gap in postwarJapan. To show why this is the case, we map the changes that have oc-curred in the gender gap, dividing them into three substantively distinctareas: active politics, passive politics, and interest politics.
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Active Politics: Turnout and Party Support
Generally, active politics refers to the nature and extent to which in-dividuals get involved in politics, and, in the mapping that follows, wefocus on what are arguably the two most important aspects of activepolitics: the rates at which women and men turn out in national electionsand the levels at which they support Japan’s many political parties.7While changes have occurred in both of these aspects of active politics,the changes that occurred in the rates at which women turn out in na-tional elections, upper and lower house alike, have been more notable.The data in Figure 1 compare male and female turnout rates in nationalelections for most of the postwar period. They were obtained by sub-tracting the former from the latter, and the differences produced by thiscalculation are negative in elections where male participation exceededthat of females, and positive when the opposite was true.
The story these data tell for both upper and lower house elections isthat what was once true about the gender gap in active politics earlier inthe postwar period is no longer the case. In the general elections heldduring the 1940s and 1950s, female turnout rates lagged behind those ofmales by an average of 10 percentage points. By the 1960s, this largedifferential narrowed to an average of 2 percentage points, and then, inthe 1970s, it disappeared in favor of female voters. Indeed, by the end ofthe 70s, women were turning out at rates slightly above those of Japa-nese males, something that continues to the present day. This swift anddramatic disappearance of the gender gap in turnout was due mostly tothe increased participation rates of Japanese women in national elec-tions. As such, it naturally leads us to ask whether or not the political be-havior of women changed in the other area of active politics, namelythat of party support.
Figure 2 contains plots of the differences in male-female supportrates for Japan’s two largest political parties, the Liberal DemocraticParty and the Japan Socialist Party.8 The data points in the graph arefrom the monthly party and cabinet support surveys taken by the JijiNews Organization, with each data point in the figure representing theaverage of twelve monthly samples.9 As in the previous figure, the val-ues are the male party support rates subtracted from the female rates,producing negative values when male support exceeds that of femalesand positive values when the converse is true.
Concerning the Liberal Democratic Party, the data in the figure re-veal that Japanese males have been much more supportive of the rulingparty than Japanese females. For the period that party support data are
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6.0
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SupportRateDifferences 1960
1963
1966
1969
1972
1975
1978
1981
1984
1987
1990
1993
1996
Year
LDP
Diff
JSP
Diff
1
–1 –3 –5 –7 –9 –11
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ates
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available, male support for the Liberal Democratic Party was, on aver-age, 8 percentage points higher. This strongly suggests that the LDPwas not the party of choice for Japanese women even though the excessof male support was different depending on the time period one exam-ines. Specifically, gender differences in LDP support rates hit highs of11 to 13 percentage points in the early 1960s and throughout the 1980sbut dropped to 7 to 8 percentage points in the 1970s and in the 1990s.
Concerning the JSP on the other hand, gender gap differences werenot nearly as dramatic. For the period covered by our data series, malesupport for the Socialists was, on average, 3 percentage points higherthan female support levels, but the excess of support the JSP enjoyedfrom Japanese males earlier in the postwar period declined dramaticallyas the postwar period progressed. In the early 1960s, male support rateswere 6 percentage points above female rates, but they dropped to just 2points above female rates for the decade of the 1990s. In the 1990s, thesmall gender difference was due to Japanese women falling away fromthe JSP in 1994 and 1995, a period that corresponds to a socialist primeminister (Murayama Tomiichi) heading a government in coalition withits postwar rival, the LDP. If these two years are excluded, however, fe-male support for the JSP becomes virtually indistinguishable from thatof males.
These trends tell us that, as voters, Japanese women became more ac-tive in national elections throughout the postwar period but that their in-creased levels of participation in national elections did not mean thatthey would behave in the same way as Japanese males in terms of theirpartisan preferences. Consistent with the mapping of female-male sup-port levels for the LDP and JSP provided above, Japanese females haveevolved partisan preferences that distinguish them from their malecounterparts. The data presented in Table 1 are a comparison of maleand female support rates for Japan’s traditionally smaller political par-ties as well as for those new parties that put up candidates in the lowerhouse elections of 1993 or 1996.
The smaller parties in the table include the more right-wing Demo-cratic Socialist Party (DSP), which split off from the JSP in the 1960smainly over foreign policy issues,10 and the Clean Government Partyor, Komeito, which appeared in the mid-1960s as the political wing ofthe neo-buddhist Value Creation Society (Soka Gakkai) and attractedmainly Japanese on the low end of the socio-economic scale (see White1970 and Hrebenar 2000, Chap. 6). They also include the Japan Com-munist Party, which has traditionally drawn its support from membersof certain independent unions and individuals committed to its program
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of remaking Japanese society,11 and the shorter-lived New Liberal Club(NLC), which split off from the LDP in 1976 over the issue of corrup-tion. The NLC performed well in the 1976 election, but it rejoined theLDP in 1986 after its support levels continued to fall in the succeedinglower house elections.
The remaining parties in the table did not appear on the Japanese po-litical scene until the early 1990s when disaffected members of the LDPleft the ruling party over its wavering commitment to political reform.12
Dennis Patterson and Misa Nishikawa 9
TABLE 1. Differences in Male-Female Support Rates for Japan’s Small andNew Parties
1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s
DemocraticSocialist
Party
0.56 0.55 0.52 0.52
CleanGovernment
Party
1.27 1.43 1.54 1.46
JapanCommunist
Party
0.77 0.73 0.92 1.07
NewLiberalClub
- 1.08 1.12 -
NewParty
Harbinger
- - - 0.89
JapanNewParty
- - - 0.82
NewLife
Party
- - - 0.52
NewFrontierParty
- - - .076
DemocraticParty ofJapan
- - - 0.61
Source: Jijistushinsha (1982 and 1991) and the Roper Center for Public Opinion ResearchData in the cells are support ratios obtained by dividing male support ratios by female sup-port ratios for the same party. A decimal >1 indicates higher female support and <1 the con-verse.
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Of these, only the New Party Harbinger (Sakigake) and the DemocraticParty of Japan (DPJ) are still in existence, the latter operating now as Ja-pan’s principal opposition party. The Japan New Party and the NewLife Party endorsed candidates only in the 1993 general election andthen joined the New Frontier Party, which, together with a number ofother parties and individuals, put up candidates only in the 1996 elec-tion.
The decimals in the table’s cells were obtained by dividing femaleparty support rates by the male support rates for the same parties, andthe results take on values greater than 1 when female support rates ex-ceeded those of males and values less than 1 when the opposite wastrue.13 We see from these data that, like the LDP, there are other politi-cal parties that Japanese females have been less inclined to support.Among Japan’s smaller parties, this has been especially true for theDemocratic Socialist Party (DSP), which women supported at rates halfthat of men, and, among Japan’s new parties of the 1990s, this has beenespecially true for the New Life Party (NLP), the Democratic Party ofJapan (DPJ), and the New Frontier Party (NFP).
On the other hand, there have been political parties in Japan that haveeither enjoyed consistently higher rates of female support throughoutthe postwar period or benefited from female support rates that increasedas the postwar period progressed. The most obvious example of the for-mer is the Clean Government Party (Komeito), which enjoyed femalesupport rates that were originally one and one-quarter times greater thanthat of males in the late 1960s, but one and one-half times the male sup-port rate by the 1980s. The other example of consistently high femalesupport is the reform-oriented New Liberal Club, which Japanese fe-males supported at moderately higher rates for the whole time that itwas active in national politics. The most notable example of the lattertrend is the growing support extended to the Japan Communist Party byJapanese females. In the 1960s and 1970s, female support for the JCPwas only three-fourths that of Japanese males, but this gap narrowed inthe 1980s, reversing itself in the 1990s when Japanese females began tosupport that party at higher rates than males.
These data tell us that, in terms of active politics, Japanese womenhave gone from being generally less partisan than their male counter-parts to having become more distinctive in their partisan choices. Thischange is important because partisanship is intimately related to othermeasures of active politics and helps us explain Japanese women be-coming more politically active as the postwar period progressed. Firstand foremost, partisanship is a strong predictor of turnout in national
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elections. Among female respondents in 1996, of those who supported apolitical party, 94.9% reported voting in that election, while only 76.7%of the unaffiliated female respondents reported voting.14 This relation-ship between partisan support and voting in national elections can befurther defined in that female party supporters tend to be more consis-tent in their vote choices, something that is also true for Japanesemales.15 Moreover, it is important to understand that female party sup-porters were much more likely than their unaffiliated counterparts to beactive in politics beyond the act of voting. For example, in 1996 thenumber of females who attended a political meeting sponsored by acandidate was low, but party supporters were more than twice as likelyto engage in this level of political participation compared to their unaf-filiated counterparts.16
Passive Politics: Purposive and Uninformed Nonpartisanship
When we use the phrase passive politics we are referring to the man-ner in which men and women in Japan are quantitatively and qualita-tively distinct in terms of their nonpartisanship. A quantitative distinctionrefers simply to the different percentages of men and women that choosenot to support any political party at any point in time. A qualitative dis-tinction, on the other hand, refers to the manner in which nonpartisanshipis expressed by men and women; that is, whether nonpartisanship is un-informed and the consequence of a respondent saying that he or she“does not know” if there is a party that he or she supports, or whethernonpartisanship is purposive in that the respondent has decided thatthere is no political party that he or she can support.
This distinction is important because the latter involves the expres-sion of nonpartisanship as the result of a purposive political choicewhile the former does not. To show that a qualitative difference refers toan empirically valid distinction, we compared “purposive” and “unin-formed” nonpartisans on different measures of attentiveness to, andknowledge of, Japanese politics. As expected, this comparison revealedthat “uninformed” nonpartisans, those selecting the “don’t know” re-sponse to party support questions, were far less knowledgeable of andattentive to politics than “purposive” nonpartisans. By way of illustra-tion, data from the 1983 Japan Election Study (JES83) revealed that27% of “purposive” nonpartisans reported paying no attention to poli-tics while 40% of “uninformed” nonpartisans reported that they paid noattention to politics. On the other hand, 13% of “uninformed” nonparti-sans stated that they did pay attention to politics while more than double
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(32%) the number of “purposive” nonpartisans reported paying atten-tion to politics.17
To track the quantitative differences that exist in the nonpartisanshipof Japanese females and males, we used the same Jiji News Organiza-tion polls that were used above to map male and female party supportdifferences. As displayed in Figure 3, these quantitative differences innonpartisanship are represented by the line with the circle value marks.The data represented by this line were obtained by subtracting all malenonpartisans from all female nonpartisans where differences took onvalues greater than 1 when female nonpartisans outnumbered their malecounterparts and negative values when the opposite was true. As theline with the circle value marks reveals, Japanese females have beenmore likely than males to be unsupportive of any political party, andthis has been true for the entire postwar period, dropping only moder-ately throughout the more than three-decade period covered by the data.In the early 1960s, there were an average of nearly 16% more nonparti-sans among Japanese females, and this average remained fairly steadyat 13% for the next two decades. The political turmoil of the 1990s wasattendant to another slight drop in female nonpartisanship, but, even inthis decade, Japanese females still represented an average of 10 percent-age points more nonpartisans than Japanese males.18
Qualitative differences in female-male nonpartisanship are repre-sented in Figure 3 by the line with the triangle value marks. These val-ues were obtained, first, by determining what proportion of all male andfemale nonpartisans were uninformed and then subtracting the maleproportion from the female proportion. The positive values captured inthe figure’s line with the triangle value marks are an indication of howmany more female nonpartisans have been uninformed compared totheir male counterparts for the period covered by our data, and the linewith the triangle value marks in the figure tells two stories about thenonpartisanship of Japanese males and females.
The first story is one of difference and speaks to how many more fe-male nonpartisans have been of the uninformed type than male nonpar-tisans. In the 1960s, female “uninformed” nonpartisans outnumberedtheir male counterparts by nearly 28 percentage points, and this differ-ence was over 30 percentage points in the earlier years of the decade.The second story, however, is one of change and concerns how quicklyand dramatically this difference nearly disappeared over the next twoand one-half decades. In the 1970s, the female surplus of “uninformed”nonpartisans declined by more than half. Throughout this decade,women represented an average of twelve percentage points more “unin-
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35.0
0
30.0
0
25.0
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15.0
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formed” nonpartisans than Japanese males, and, in the next decade, thisaverage declined to 5.8 percentage points. Finally, this male-female gapin the proportion of nonpartisans that are “uninformed” versus thosethat are “purposive,” declined even further in the 1990s. In fact, by1996, the gap rested at a substantively and statistically insignificant 2percentage points.
The trends plotted in Figure 3 state that the manner in which Japanesefemales express their nonpartisanship underwent a dramatic transfor-mation throughout the postwar period. In the 1960s, less than one-halfof all female nonpartisans were purposive, that is, unattached to any po-litical party as a function of a negative political preference.19 By the1980s, however, purposive nonpartisans grew to an 85% share of all fe-male nonpartisans and to over 90% by the 1990s. These changes in thepatterns of female nonpartisanship are consistent with the active poli-tics mapping we provided above. Indeed, it makes intuitive sense that asfemale turnout rates in national elections increased and as female partysupport patterns reflected clearly identifiable pockets of preference andrejection, so their nonpartisanship became increasingly reflective of aninformed political choice.20
On the other hand, these active and passive politics patterns are trou-blesome, especially in light of how the gender gap in Japan has tradi-tionally been understood as a function of Japanese women simply beingless interested in and more distant from politics than Japanese males.This view of the gender gap in Japan requires us, first, to make light ofthe dramatic changes in the political behavior of Japanese women thatwe have mapped thus far and, second, to ignore how they may be con-nected to the way that Japan’s political parties have (or have not) repre-sented their political interests of Japanese females. Again, it is ourpurpose in this paper to make this connection in a convincing manner,and this is a task that begins with showing how the political interests ofJapanese females contrast with those of their male counterparts.
Interest Politics: Gender and Issue Preferences
Like the other aspects of the gender gap that we previously mapped,interest politics, or the preferences of Japanese men and women on sa-lient political issues, have also revealed an interesting postwar dy-namic. First, the issue preferences of Japanese men and women havebeen different throughout the postwar period, but these differences haveevolved as the postwar period progressed. To identify these differencesand show how they changed, we compared the responses of Japanese
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men and women to questions posed on a number of salient issues at fivedifferent time points in the postwar period. The time points we exam-ined corresponded to the holding of a general election and the availabil-ity of a national election study for that contest.21
The first difference we identified in the interest politics of Japanesemales and females concerns Japanese women having a much higherprobability than males of expressing no opinion on posed questions byselecting the “do not know” response. This was particularly true earlierin the postwar period because, while differences in question format donot permit an exact comparison across the five national election studieswe examined, we do observe a trend on similar types of questionsacross the samples that we examined. Specifically, in the 1967 and 1976samples, an average of more than 30% female respondents expressed noopinion to posed issue questions by selecting the “do not know” re-sponse, but, in the election studies that were conducted in 1983 and1996, this proportion had dropped to an average of 12% and 8% respec-tively.
The decline of uninformed female respondents across the samples weexamined was dramatic, but the fact remains that Japanese females stilltend to be at least somewhat more “uninformed” on more political is-sues than Japanese males.22 This was not true for all issues because thedata we examined revealed that certain issues involved greater genderdifferences than others. One part of this involved domestic issues versusforeign relations issues, where female respondents were more likely toprovide uninformed responses on questions of the latter type. Indeed,when female respondents were confronted with questions on such top-ics as Japan’s relations with other countries, uninformed responseswere relatively numerous but, when questions touched on such domes-tic problems as welfare, women’s issues, and scandals or political cor-ruption, the number of uninformed responses dropped considerably.
Another part of this concerned the relationship between the timeli-ness or temporal salience of an issue and the propensity of female re-spondents to provide an uninformed response. For example, in the 1967Japanese Election Study, respondents were asked if they thought thegovernment should expand the country’s Self-Defense Forces. Manyissue questions in that particular survey elicited responses where morethan 30% of females interviewed answered by saying they “do notknow,” but, on this self-defense forces question, only 6% responded inan uninformed fashion.23 Issues involving Japan’s Self-Defense Forcesand its security relations with the United States were referred to as “highpolitics” issues in the early part of the postwar period because of the
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emotion and divisiveness they generated. These “high politics” issueswere salient throughout the 1950s and into the early part of the 1960s,but, because of the LDP’s efforts to create a less divisive political cli-mate by emphasizing such “low politics” issues as economic growth,they lost their salience as the decade progressed. Nonetheless, when theJapanese government adopted a revised U.S.-Japan Security Treaty in1960, these issues were at the center of much social unrest and politicalturmoil. For this reason, it is likely that questions on security evokedmemories of the social unrest Japan faced when such issues were higheron the political agenda. This helps explain why females provided lowlevels of uninformed responses to this question in the 1967 survey andwhy uninformed responses were over four times as high when the samequestion was asked in the 1976 JABISS survey.
In addition to differences in the propensity for selecting the “do notknow” response to issue questions, the interest politics gender gap in Ja-pan also involves Japanese females and males taking different positionson certain issues. For some issues, differences in the positions taken byfemales and males were complete, which means that female and male re-spondents took utterly contrasting positions on those issues. For others,however, issue position differences were partial, which means that maleand female respondents disagreed, but only on one side of the issue while,on the other side, they were in rough agreement. Because this distinctionmay not be entirely clear, consider the following example, which con-cerns the preferences of male and female respondents on the problem ofJapan’s relations with China and the Soviet Union (see Table 2).
In the 1967 Japan Election Study, respondents were asked if theythought relations between Japan and the Soviet Union, and Japan andChina, should be closer or remain just as they are. In both cases, the1967 questions elicited responses that placed males on one side of theissue and females on the other. For both countries, more men thanwomen felt that relations should be closer, and, contrarily, more womenthan men felt that relations should stay the same. This is an illustrationof the position of Japanese females and males involving a complete dif-ference, but, in later surveys, when respondents were asked to attach thelevel of importance they thought Japan’s relations with the Soviet Un-ion (1983) and China (1976) deserved, these complete differences gaveway to positions that were partially different. Specifically, in the 1976and 1983 samples (Table 2), more men than women felt that relationswith China (1976) and the Soviet Union (1983) were important, but, inboth samples, nearly equivalent proportions of men and women felt thatJapan’s relations with these two nations were not so important.
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Two other patterns that distinguish the interest politics of Japanesemales and females were prevalent in the five election studies we exam-ined. One of these refers to the finding that some issues were more de-fining of the differences that exist in the interest politics of Japanesemales and females. What we mean by more defining is that certain is-sues were characterized by low levels of uninformed responses, espe-cially on the part of female respondents, and involved sizeable genderdifferences in the way that respondents expressed their preferences.Consider, for example, the issue of women in Japanese society. TheJapanese public was polled on this issue in the 1983, 1993, and 1996election studies, and, while measured somewhat differently in each, thedata in Table 3 reveal the importance of gender quite clearly. In 1983,over 20% of female respondents felt that the issue of women in societywas important while only 13% of males responded in this way. Con-trarily, over one-half of male respondents stated that this issue was un-important while a little over one-third of Japanese females responded inthe same way. Again, although measured differently, gender differenceson women’s issues were distributed in the same way in the subsequenttwo samples. In 1993, 16% of Japanese females reported belonging to anorganization promoting women’s issues while virtually no male respon-
Dennis Patterson and Misa Nishikawa 17
TABLE 2. Male and Female Opinion on Japan’s Relations with China and theSoviet Union
Men Women
Japan’s Relations with the Soviet Union (1967)
should be closer 55.4% 39.9%
stay the same 44.6 60.1
Japan’s Relations with China (1967)
should be closer 63.5 46.3
stay the same 36.5 53.7
Japan’s Relations with the Soviet Union (1983)
important 31.0 14.3
not important 33.7 36.2
Japan’s Relations with China (1976)
important 52.1 29.3
not important 31.3 29.5
Source: JES (1976), JABISS (1976), and JES (1983).
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dents reported such a membership, and, in 1996, more than twice asmany women as men selected the status of women in society as an im-portant political issue.24
The other pattern is witnessed in the differences that exist in the kindsof political problems that men and women evaluated as important. Thedata in Table 4 are taken from three of the five surveys that we exam-ined and involved respondents stating whether or not a presented issuewas important. The percentages in the table’s cells were obtained bysubtracting the proportion of female respondents seeing a particular is-sue as being important from the proportion of male respondents answer-ing the question in the same way. Percentages with positive valuesindicate how many more male respondents saw the particular issue asimportant than females, and a percentage with a negative value, the op-posite.
The questions from which these differences were derived covered awide range of political issues, including both domestic political issuesand problems concerning Japan’s foreign relations. Moreover, some ofthe questions appearing in the table have been sporadically salient while
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TABLE 3. The Gender Gap on the Importance of Women’s Issues
Men Women
To what extent do you think that women’s issues areimportant? (1983)
very important 2.9% 5.2%
important 10.4 16.5
not very important 42.4 33.3
not important at all 8.8 4.2
do not know 7.3 11.1
Respondent is a member of an organization promotingwomen’s issues (1993)
member 0.4 16.3
not a member 99.6 83.7
Japan today as a nation faces many tasks. Do you havethings which are on this list that you want the governmentto especially focus on? (1996)
women’s issues selected 7.7 15.4
women’s issues not selected 92.3 84.6
Sources: JES (1983), JES (1993), and JEDS (1996).
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others have manifested ongoing political salience throughout the post-war period. While degrees of difference varied across issues that ap-peared in the surveys we examined, the pattern is unmistakable.Overall, Japanese males appear more likely to see a larger number of is-sues as being important than Japanese females, but the data also indicatethat the male tendency to evaluate certain issues more highly than fe-males declined over the period covered by the three samples.25 Whilesome of this decline might be due to differences in question formatsacross the three samples in the table, there is little doubt that the 1996
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TABLE 4. Gender Differences and the Importance of Issues*
1976 1983 1996
Defense 16.2% 9.7% 5.5%
Trade 15.5% 4.1%
Social Welfare 7.1% 1.6% �7.9%
Small Government 9.9%
Scandal 11.0%
The Emperor 13.2% 4.8%
Nuclear Weapons 9.3%
Security Treaty 20.2% 13.9% 13.9%
Women’s Issues �8.1% �7.1%
Japan-China Relations 22.8%
Relations with North Korea 3.9%
The Northern Territories 25.3%
The Importance of Business 13.2%
The Importance of Strikes 14.7%
Money in Politics 17.1%
Tax Reform 3.0%
Education �9.8%
Save the Global Environment �8.0%
Home Environment �3.1%
Prolong the Economic Good Times 4.5%
Administrative Reform 25.4%
Budget Deficit 12.0%
Relations with the Soviet Union 11.7%
* The figures in the cells are how many more men than women see the issue as important.
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survey contained a number of issues that were of greater importance towomen than to Japanese men. In this sample, more women than mensaw women’s issues, social welfare, education, and the environment asbeing important political issues, while more men than women thoughtissues such as administrative reform, the budget deficit, the economy,and defense issues were important.
Political Interest and Party Support
From the data we have presented above on the three faces of genderpolitics in postwar Japan, two conclusions appear to be beyond chal-lenge. The first is that throughout the postwar period, the political be-havior of Japanese women has involved an interesting and complicateddynamic. Japanese women have come to participate in national elec-tions at rates slightly higher than men, and they have evolved specificpatterns of partisan support and issue preferences that distinguish themfrom Japanese males. The second conclusion is that this interesting andcomplicated pattern of political behavior undoubtedly involves muchmore than Japanese women being less interested in and knowledgeableof politics because of how Japan’s history and culture have helped de-fine gender roles there. While it may be accurate to say that Japanese fe-males are more distant from the world of national politics than theirmale counterparts, such findings alone do not tell us why Japanese fe-males are characterized by distinctive issue preferences and the pocketsof party support and rejection that we have mapped above.
The problem is not that the gender has been studied more in theUnited States and other advanced nations than in Japan, because manyscholars have examined the gender gap in Japan. Moreover, the prob-lem is not that scholars who have studied Japan’s gender gap are en-tirely incorrect about why it has manifested itself in the way it has. Wellknown social scientists, like Miyake Ichiro (1995) and Watanuki Joji(1991), have studied the gender gap in Japan, but they rejected issuepreferences as a potentially important explanatory variable because oftheir findings that issue effects have been less important for Japanesefemales than for males. We do not question this specific conclusion be-cause the data we presented in Table 4 confirm this conclusion. We do,on the other hand, challenge the interpretation given to such findingsthat the political preferences Japanese women do express are irrelevantor, more narrowly, unconnected to their political behavior.
As we have stated above, the political behavior of Japanese women,as we mapped it in the preceding section, can be explained by their dis-
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tinctive political interests. What remains to be done is to make this con-nection in a clear and convincing manner, and this effort proceeds fromthe idea that the partisan distinctions of Japanese females are the resultof informed political choices that are motivated by a different set of is-sue preferences than Japanese males. In this way, the different positionsJapanese females take on the political issues they deem important arepolitically meaningful because they are at the base of their propensity toextend their political support to some political parties while withhold-ing it from others. Those political parties that appropriately represent is-sues of concern to Japanese females enjoy higher levels of support fromthem than those that do not.
The active politics mapping we provided above showed us that Japa-nese males were more supportive of the Liberal Democratic Party andthe New Frontier Party than Japanese females, but that women in Japanwere more attracted to the Clean Government Party and became in-creasingly attracted to the Japan Communist Party as the postwar periodprogressed.26 The interest politics mapping that we provided aboveshowed that in 1996, Japanese males found such issues as administra-tive reform,27 the budget deficit, economic recovery, and defense issuesto be of importance, while Japanese females considered social welfare,the position of women in society, education, and the environment to bethe issues of importance. If the understanding of the gender gap we haveoutlined here is correct, the patterns of partisan support that distinguishJapanese females from males should be due to the parties they respec-tively support representing more effectively those specific issues eachgroup has deemed to be important.
To test the validity of this understanding of the gender gap in Japan,we use the JEDS96 election study,28 and our first step in this effort is todefine the dependent variable as the stated partisanship of respondents,that is, either the single party respondents reported supporting in thissurvey or their selection of one of two nonpartisan categories. In theJEDS96 data, the dependent variable’s specific categories are the Lib-eral Democratic Party (LDP), the New Frontier Party (NFP), the Demo-cratic Party of Japan (DPJ), the Japan Socialist Party (JSP), the JapanCommunist Party (JCP), and the “purposive” and “uninformed” non-partisans that we defined above.29 Defined in this way, the dependentvariable is a categorical variable with more than two categories whichmeans that, to estimate the impact of issues and other predictors of par-tisanship, the appropriate form of the model is multinomial logit.
Our theoretical perspective states that, among other things, it is theissue preferences of Japanese male and female respondents that push
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them to the political parties they favor while, at the same time, keepingthem away from those they do not. For this reason, we capture the parti-san impact of respondents’ issue preferences by using the 1996 study’sissue importance questions as the principal independent variables to beincluded in the model. Issues that respondents said were important werecoded a 1, while those that respondents felt were not important, a 0. Werecognize that there are other factors that help explain the distinctivepatterns of partisan preference of Japanese females. For example,changes in female political behavior earlier in the postwar period are inpart due to Japanese women being granted the suffrage in 1945 and thefact that those who were of voting age prior to this declined as a propor-tion of the electorate as the postwar period progressed. We attempt tocapture this and other potentially important factors by adding severalcontrol variables to the multinomial logit models we estimate below.30
Our first control variable is a measure of respondents’ interest in pol-itics, which we capture by using a question that has respondents report-ing how much attention they pay to political news.31 As stated above,Japanese females tend to be less interested in and attentive to politicsthan their male counterparts, and this is an attitude that is also related toa respondent’s propensity to be nonpartisan as we have shown above.Consequently, including this variable in the models we estimate belowis essential for testing our political interest understanding of the gendergap in postwar Japan. We want to be certain that the partisan choices ofJapanese women are the rational, purposive decisions we have said theyare and not behavior patterns derived in obeisance to socio-cultural pre-dilections that have been deemed to keep Japanese women uninterestedin politics. If our view is correct, issues should remain significant pre-dictors of partisan support even after controlling for attention to poli-tics.
The remaining explanatory variables in our models involve those thatwill help control for other factors that influence partisanship in Japan,and, while this includes many possibilities, we have identified three cat-egories of variables that have been shown to be most important in stud-ies of Japanese voting behavior (see Horie and Umemura 1986; Koheiet al. 1991; Miyake 1998; and Richardson 1997). The first category re-fers to the occupation of respondents and includes three specific occu-pational groups: small business owners, farmers, and union members.These occupational groups have been selected because they are associ-ated with well-known partisan influences. Farmers and small businessowners form perhaps the two most important Liberal Democratic Partysupport groups while union membership has long been associated with
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support for parties of the left. These controls are entered in our modelsseparately as dummy variables where farmers were coded a 1 and re-maining respondents a 0, where small business owners were coded a 1and remaining respondents a 0, and, finally, union members were codeda 1 and remaining respondents a 0.
The second category of control variable includes characteristics ofrespondents that tap into their social status, specifically, education andincome. Education has been negatively associated with LDP supportand, with one exception, positively associated with opposition support.Traditionally, supporters of the opposition Komeito are those Japanesewho have been missed by the postwar economic miracle and, thus, com-prise the less educated (and lower income) Japanese. For this reason,education is negatively associated with support for this party, and, be-cause the New Frontier Party was composed of a large number of formerKomeito supporters, our expectation is for education to be negativelyassociated with a respondent’s support for that party as well (see, e.g.,Hrebenar 2000, especially Chap. 6). Income is similar in influence toeducation, but unfortunately it is somewhat more complicated in itsoverall relationship to party support in Japan. Respondents’ levels of in-come manifest no clear relationship with support for most of Japan’spolitical parties, but income does have a strong negative relationshipwith support for the Komeito and the Japan Communist Party. The latterrelationship is due to the fact that the Communists draw very few sup-porters from among Japan’s wealthy while the former concerns the factthat the Komeito has recruited heavily from among lower income Japa-nese. For this reason, we expect this variable to be negatively related tosupport for both the JCP and the NFP.
The final category of control variable we include concerns the impactof geography and age on party support in Japan. It is well known thatmuch of the LDP’s support resides in rural Japan while most oppositionparties have looked to the nation’s urban-metropolitan areas for theirpartisan support.32 To capture this relationship in our analysis, we haveincluded a variable that identifies the size of the city in which a respon-dent lives. As stated above, given the strongly rural character of LDPsupport and the urban flavor to most opposition party support, we ex-pect this variable to take on a negative sign for the LDP but a positiveone for the other parties. Generation is also an important factor, not onlybecause of the extension of suffrage to Japanese females in 1945, butalso because the age of respondents is positively associated with sup-port for the LDP. To capture these important impacts, we include the
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age of respondents as well as a categorical variable that captures the im-pact of generation.33
With the relationships and variables defined, we divided the sampleby gender and estimated the impact of issue preferences on partychoices, first for Japanese males and then for Japanese females. Whiledegrees of freedom concerns required that individual issue impacts beconsidered separately, all abovementioned control variables were in-cluded in each estimation. The category on the dependent variable thatwe treated as the base category in our analysis was the “uninformed”nonpartisans category because it contains those respondents who aremost likely to have no position on the issue importance questions weused as our primary explanatory variables. The results of these estima-tions are presented in Table 5 for Japanese males and Table 6 for Japa-
24 WOMEN & POLITICS
TABLE 5. Issues and Partisanship for Japanese Men
Issues Political Parties
LDP NFP DPJ JSP JCP No Party
Economic Recovery .807*
Political Ethics
Tax Reform 1.029** .890*
Social Welfare
National Security
Trade Policy+
Admin. Reform
Budget Deficit .985* 1.426** .885*
Science Technology+
Citizen Participation �1.001*
Home Environment
Education 1.188* 1.389*
Regional Autonomy
International Aid+
Global Environment
Women in Society+
* Significant at the p < .10 level.** Significant at the p < .05 level.*** Significant at the p < .01 level.+ Less than 10% mentioned as an important issue.
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nese females. The tables’ columns correspond to respondents’ partisanchoices, while the rows refer to the various issue importance questionsthat were asked in the 1996 JEDS election survey. Moreover, we re-ported coefficients only on those issues that raised the probability of arespondent supporting a political party at the p < .10 level or better. Thisallowed us to focus only on those issues that were reliable predictors ofpartisanship and to determine how their impact on partisanship differedfor male and female respondents.34
Overall, the results presented in the two tables tell us that differencesin the political interests of Japanese males and females contributed sig-nificantly to the gender gap as it has manifested itself in Japan in recentyears. Specifically, the issue impact estimates that we present tell usthat Japanese males identified economic recovery, the budget deficit,
Dennis Patterson and Misa Nishikawa 25
TABLE 6. Issues and Partisanship for Japanese Women
Issues Political Parties
LDP NFP DPJ JSP JCP No Party
Economic Recovery
Political Ethics
Tax Reform .707*
Social Welfare .745* 1.361*** 1.563*** .537*
National Security+
Trade Policy+
Admin. Reform 1.561*** 1.201* 1.271** 1.335**
Budget Deficit 1.041* .979*
Science Technology+
Citizen Participation+
Home Environment 1.225** 1.234**
Education .785* .989* .947* 1.152**
Regional Autonomy+
International Aid+
Global Environment 1.496***
Women in Society 1.141*
* Significant at the p < .10 level.** Significant at the p < .05 level.*** Significant at the p < .01 level.+ Less than 10% mentioned as an important issue.
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and tax reform as important issues, while Japanese females emphasizedsocial welfare, the home and global environment issues, and education.Moreover, coefficients presented in the two tables indicate that thesediffering issue preferences help explain the party support patterns ofJapanese males and females which, taken together, support our under-standing of the gender gap in postwar Japan. On the other hand, thereare patterns in the two tables that tell us that the gender gap in Japan isperhaps a somewhat richer phenomenon than our theoretical under-standing has suggested.
The results in Table 5 tell us that economic recovery, tax reform, thebudget deficit, and a few other issues were important predictors of malepartisanship. For example, although marginally significant, believingthat economic recovery is an important issue raised the probability ofJapanese males expressing support for the LDP by two and a quartertimes.35 Of those issues that raised the probability of a male respondentsupporting a political party, the most notable in terms of substantive andstatistical significance were the tax reform and budget deficit issues.What is interesting in our results, however, is that these two issuespushed Japanese males away from the LDP to one of the opposition par-ties or to choosing not to support any political party at all. Believing thattax reform is an important issue raised the probability of a male respon-dent expressing support for the JSP by 2.8 times while seeing the budgetdeficit as important raised the probability of a male respondent express-ing support for the JCP by 4.16 times. Moreover, seeing either one ofthese issues as significant more than doubled the probability of a malerespondent choosing to support no political party.
When we compare the results presented in Table 5 to those we ob-tained for Japanese females, we notice that salient issues in 1996 gener-ally had a lower impact on the partisan preferences of Japanese malesthan Japanese females. Evidence of this is witnessed in that fact that thepartisan preferences of Japanese females involved many more substan-tively and statistically significant issues than did party support patternsamong Japanese males. This does not mean that the political interests ofmales in Japan do not connect to their partisan preferences because Jap-anese males have defined political interests that do indeed drive theirpartisan preferences. Rather, what distinguishes males from females inJapan is that the partisanship of the latter is much more a function of thedistinct political interests they evolved throughout the postwar period.This means that, while such predictors of partisanship in Japan as occu-pation, education, age, and place of residence were substantively andstatistically significant for both male and female respondents, they re-
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duced the role that issues played in the partisan support patterns ofmales much more than those of Japanese females.
Another difference one obtains when comparing the data in Table 6to those in the previous table is the clear picture that the Liberal Demo-cratic Party did not credibly represent any issue that influenced the par-tisanship of Japanese females. Indeed, Table 6 suggests strongly thatissues evaluated highly by female respondents led them to any party butthe LPD. In fact, the interesting finding is that, while certain issues wereundoubtedly important for Japanese females, these issue preferencesdid not generally lead female respondents to any one political party inparticular. For example, we can see from the data in Table 6 that issuepreferences which led Japanese females to increase their support for theJSP also led them to increase their support for the JCP.
Issues like social welfare, education, administrative reform, and thehome environment all raised the probability of female respondents sup-porting the Japan Socialist (JSP) and Japan Communist (JCP) Parties byan average of three to four times. There was no issue that singularlypushed Japanese women to support the Socialists, which is surprisingbecause we would have expected the status of women in society issue toencourage women to support the JSP and not the JCP as it did in thedata. In a broader context, however, this result may not be so surprising.It is true that, under the leadership of the first female to lead a major Jap-anese political party, Takako Doi, the JSP was viewed as the party com-mitted to advancing the cause of women in Japanese society. Despitethis, we must remember that in the aftermath of the 1993 election, Doiwas no longer the party’s leader, and by 1994 the JSP had abandonedmany of its traditional issue stances in order to join the government withthe LDP and Sakigake. On the other hand, the Japan Communist Partyhad generally fielded more female candidates than Japan’s other partiesand, since the late 1980s, it had come to stand for reforms that wouldend politics as it had been practiced for so long in postwar Japan. It is forthese reasons that the JCP benefited from female respondents seeing theplace of women in Japanese society as an important issue in 1996.36
The data in Table 6 also tell us that issues which attracted Japanesefemales to the JCP and JSP also attracted them to two other politicalparties that ran in the election of 1996. Specifically, the global environ-ment issue, which more female respondents reported as being importantin the 1996 survey, encouraged Japanese women to support the Demo-cratic Party of Japan and not one of Japan’s traditional parties of the left.It is also interesting that the administrative reform issue, in addition topushing female respondents to several parties, was only a marginally
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significant predictor of female support for the DPJ. This is because thatparty’s leader, Kan Naoto, took Japan’s political scene by storm by pro-moting exactly that issue. When he was Minister of Health and Welfare,he strongly advocated reform in his ministry because AIDS-taintedblood had gotten into the nation’s supply. Kan and other DPJ leadersthen used this problem as an indicator of Japan’s need for general bu-reaucratic reform. Despite this, Japanese females who supported gov-ernment reform efforts were 4.73 times more likely to express supportfor the New Frontier Party. This is perhaps explained by the fact that,despite Kan Naoto’s popularity as a reformer, one of the NFP’s leaders,Ozawa Ichiro, has also been one of Japan’s staunchest advocates for po-litical reform.
CONCLUSION
The gender gap is an important political phenomenon that is wit-nessed in all democratic nations. While disagreements exist and unan-swered questions remain, we know much more today about howdifferences in the political behavior of men and women manifest them-selves and why such gender differences take the forms they do. In theanalysis provided above, we have shown that, like other advanced in-dustrial democracies, the gender gap in Japan is a rich phenomenon thathas involved an interesting postwar dynamic. This is because Japanesefemales have come to turn out in national elections at rates equal to orhigher than men at the same time that they evolved issue preferencesand patterns of party support that distinguish them from Japanesemales.
We find these patterns to be important for two reasons in particular.The first, as we mentioned above, is intellectual and concerns what ourresults suggest about the manner in which the gender gap has tradition-ally been understood in Japan. The patterns that define the political be-havior of Japanese women and the manner in which they are connectedto each other suggest strongly that gender and politics in Japan are re-lated in ways that go beyond the traditional view that women are less in-terested in and more distant from the political process in Japan thanmen. We argued above that the patterns of party support and rejectionthat distinguish Japanese females from Japanese males are the result ofpurposive political decisions. We then showed that the partisan prefer-ences of Japanese females could be understood as the result of the polit-
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ical issues they identified as important and certain political partiesbeing more credible representatives of those issues than others.
The second reason we find these results to be important is politicaland concerns what the patterns we have uncovered suggest about howone should understand electoral politics in Japan, both in the recentpast, the present, and the near future. In the absence of more recent indi-vidual-level data, like those we used in the preceding analysis, our dis-cussion of the political implications of our findings must involve acertain amount of conjecture. Nonetheless, we can derive some hypoth-eses that reflect our expectations in light of certain characteristics ofJapanese politics today, and what the analysis we provided above hasrevealed about the gender gap in Japan.
Perhaps most important is the idea that, while the election of 1993only temporarily pushed the LDP out of power, it signaled quite clearlythat the long postwar era of predominant party politics was over. This isimportant because it means that no political party in Japan can now sin-gle-handedly control the lower house of the Diet. As a result of this, ourexpectation is that political parties will expend more time and effort at-tracting members of that large and significant pool of voters that Japa-nese females comprise. This is because any political party that hasambitions of establishing itself as a majority party should, among otherthings, work very hard to represent those issues that are important toJapanese females.
We see from the data presented in Table 6 that, of the two with anychance of winning enough seats to gain a majority of lower house seatsin the election of 1996, only the New Frontier Party represented issuesthat Japanese females felt were important. We can also see from thedata in the table that the NFP’s efforts were only partially successfulsince other parties also attracted female supporters through the issuesthey advanced. While no single party has enjoyed significant electoralgains in the two elections that followed the 1996 contest, neither did anypolitical party radically alter its issue profile. This, of course changedwith the arrival of current LDP Prime Minister, Koizumi Junichiro, be-cause Koizumi has done several things that depart from the behavior ofhis two mainstream predecessors, Prime Ministers Obuchi and Mori.Perhaps most important are his making the most credible declarationyet that the LDP is committed to implementing the reforms necessary tosee the country through its current structural adjustment and restoreeconomic growth, and his attempts to woo female voters by selectingfive women to his cabinet.
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These are political moves that we would expect from a party leaderwho was serious about attracting support in sufficient levels to rule as amajority party. Evidence that this view is correct is witnessed in howmuch improved the LDP’s electoral performance was in the most recentUpper House election (2001) compared to its rather lackluster perfor-mances in the post-1996 elections that preceded this contest.37 Whileverification that the LDP’s better performance in the most recent UpperHouse election was due to the manner in which the current prime minis-ter altered the LDP’s issue commitments will have to wait the availabil-ity of survey data, we can say that the analysis of the gender gapprovided a reason to think that this is an intellectual and political ques-tion worthy of investigation. Hopefully, the findings we provided abovewill encourage research on this important phenomenon that recognizesthe importance of acknowledging that it is political interest, and not in-terest in politics, that drives gender differences in Japan.
NOTES
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the MidwestPolitical Science Association, April, 27-30, 2000, Chicago, Illinois. The authors wouldlike to thank Kathy Bawn, Janet Box-Steffensmeier, Darren Davis, Brad Richardson,and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.
1. For a discussion of the role played by socio-economic resources in the politicalbehavior of males and females in different countries, see Verba, Nie, and Kim (1978).See also Pharr (1981, Chap. 5)
2. We should point out that the negative attitudes expressed by women in this 1990government survey (quoted in Iwao 1993, 215) are at least partially a function of beingtaken at a time when postwar corruption was at its height. Nonetheless, these negativeattitudes toward politics are consistent with the attitudes of Japanese women evenafter they came to participate in politics at higher levels later in the postwar period.One explanation for this is that the feminist movement in Japan kept Japanese women“. . . at arm’s length from the allegedly patriarchal state.” See Mikanagi (2001, 11).That feelings of alienation continue to define the orientation of Japanese women to-ward politics can be found in some more recent work on gender and politics in Japan.See Ozawa (2000) and Martin (2001).
3. Japan has frequently been treated as an outlier among developed nations (see,e.g., Johnson 1982), but much research has shown it to be not so different from its Eu-ropean counterparts. (For a discussion of the problem of exceptionalism in studies ofpostwar Japanese politics, see Richardson and Patterson 2001.) For example, Verba,Nie, and Kim (1978) found that the lack of Japanese female participation in a broadrange of political activities was similar to that of women in Austria and the extent towhich men turned out in elections at higher rates than women (primarily in the 1960s)was similar to patterns in the United States and the Netherlands. See especially Chapter12. See also, Verba and Nie (1972). Like the gender gap in Japan, Shapiro and Mahajan
30 WOMEN & POLITICS
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(1986) showed that women and men in the United States had different issue prefer-ences, and Jelen, Thomas, and Wilcox (1994) showed that this was also true of men andwomen in Italy, France, Belguim, Germany, the Netherlands, and the U.K. Finally, theessays on gender and party politics in Lovenduski and Norris (1993) address the issueof how political parties have differentially approached the issue of female recruitmentand support, leading to gender gap patterns that are different across the countries of Eu-rope.
4. For example, Verba, Burns, and Schlozman (1997) completed a study of genderand political engagement and found that, even after controlling for all other factors,American women still appear to be characterized by lower levels of interest in, and lessof a “taste for politics” compared to males. For a discussion of this theme relative to Japa-nese women, see Aoki (1991), Iwao (1993), and Pharr (1981).
5. We should note here that the official English name of JSP was changed to the “So-cial Democratic Party of Japan” in February 1991. Moreover, in January of 1996, the “ofJapan” part was dropped, and the party’s acronym became the SDP. In the interest ofconsistency and to avoid confusion with Japan’s Democratic Socialist Party (DSP), wewill refer to the party as the JSP throughout this paper.
6. When we use the phrase party support, we are referring to the manner in which re-spondents in Japanese election studies are asked about the political party(s) they chooseto support. In Japan, respondents are asked if there is a political party that they supportrather than whether or not they think of themselves as a partisan, as is done in the U.S.National Election Studies.
7. We say that these are the most important aspects of active politics because, as weshow in more detail, they are related to each other and other aspects of active politicssuch as being active in campaigns and getting involved in candidate organizations.
8. We should note here that the SDPJ is no longer the second largest party in Japanbecause in the 1996 lower house election, the Socialists went from 70 to 15 seats, mak-ing it one of Japan’s smaller parties.
9. The one exception to this is 1960, which is the average of seven samples.10. The DSP has been close to those LDP members who support an independent Jap-
anese foreign policy with a less constrained military. See Hrebenar (1992), Chapter 7.11. In the 1990s, however, the JCP’s popularity increased as it promoted itself as the one
Japanese political party committed to political reform. See Hrebenar (2000), Chapter 8.12. We should point out that some members of these new parties were from other po-
litical parties, like JSP members who joined the New Party Harbinger or the DemocraticParty of Japan. Moreover, there are other new parties operating today that are not in thetable because the Jiji support data that we use for the table’s cells are not yet available forthese organizations. For more on these new political parties, see Curtis (1999) andHrebenar (2000), Chapter 5.
13. We used ratios instead of difference scores in the table because they provide ameasure that can be compared more meaningfully across political parties of varyingsizes.
14. In the same sample (JEDS96), 92.7% of Japanese males who supported a partyreported voting while 77.9% of those who did not support a party reported voting.
15. In the same 1996 election study, 80% of respondents reported voting for the partywith which they identified. The one exception was the JSP, where just over half of itsmale supporters were loyal and a little more than a third of female supporters wereloyal. As mentioned above, this was due mainly to the party abandoning its traditionalpositions on security and the Japanese military in order to join an LDP coalition gov-
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ernment. For a discussion of the role of partisanship and voting consistency in postwarJapan, see Kohei et al. (1991).
16. This same pattern is also true for Japanese males.17. Other election studies done in Japan provide the same results.18. We should note here that from 1960 to the present, nonpartisans grew as a propor-
tion of the Japanese electorate, but this category of electors grew much faster amongmales than females, leading to the downward trend revealed in Figure 3.
19. The comparable figures for Japanese males in the 1960s were 75% purposive and25% uninformed.
20. We should note here that in the election studies we use in the following subsec-tion, “purposive” nonpartisans turned out at higher rates in lower house elections than“uninformed” nonpartisans.
21. The specific samples we use here are the 1967 Japan Election Study (JES67), the1976 JABISS Survey, the 1983 Japan Election Survey (JES83), the 1993 Japan Elec-tion Survey (JES93), and the 1996 Japan Election Data Survey (JEDS96).
22. In the interest of clarity, we note here that we define uninformed in this context inthe same way we did relative to partisans. This is simply those respondents who se-lected the “do not know” response when presented with questions on specific issues.
23. As we suggested above, the welfare and scandal issues questions, which were ofnotable domestic import at the time, also involved lower levels of uninformed re-sponses in that survey.
24. It must be remembered that since Japan in 1996 was plagued with pressing eco-nomic problems, this is actually a fairly high proportion.
25. Again, these findings are consistent with patterns identified above relative to fe-male respondents being more likely to answer issue questions by selecting the “do notknow” response, especially in the earlier surveys.
26. As shown above, it was also true that Japanese females became more attracted tothe JSP but that this change simply reduced the gap that existed between male and fe-male support for that party. See Figure 2.
27. Administrative reform (gyosei kaikaku) became salient in the 1980s under theprime ministership of Yasuhiro Nakasone. At that time, the issue involved removingthe government from a range of economic activities, the most notable of which was theprivatization of the Japan National Railroad. This issue experienced a renewed sa-lience in the 1990s as economic reform became partially defined as continued govern-ment efforts to remove itself from the Japanese economy.
28. Like the other surveys we used above, these data are available from ICPSR.29. Again, the two nonpartisan categories are “uninformed,” where respondents se-
lected the “do not know” response to the issue question, and purposive, where the re-spondent simply reported that there is simply no party that he or she can support.
30. For a recent review of factors that account for partisanship in Japan, see Miyake(1998) and Richardson (1997).
31. The specific question we used asks whether or not a respondent has read a news-paper article on the tax reform issue. While asking whether or not a respondent is inter-ested in politics is a more direct way to measure interest in politics, such a generalquestion was not available in this survey. The substitute question we employ here isnonetheless a good proxy for measuring this important attitude.
32. The JSP is somewhat of an exception here in that it originally had some rural sup-port through its efforts to organize workers in agriculture and that its support for muchof the postwar period came from white-collar workers all over Japan.
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33. We tested the impact of these two variables on issue effects in our models sepa-rately. The results produced by doing this involved no differences in terms of which is-sues were statistically significant predictors of male and female partisanship and verysmall, insignificant differences in terms of how much issues influenced the partisan-ship of Japanese females and males.
34. Issues that fewer than 10% of respondents considered important were excludedfrom the analysis because they involved too little variance to produce reliable results.
35. The coefficients in the table are log odds ratios. Consequently, taking the eco-nomic recovery issue as an example, a coefficient of .807 raises the probability of a malerespondent supporting the LDP by 2.24 times because e.807 = 2.24
36. We should also note that the JSP, being the symbolic party of Japanese womenunder Doi only to lose this image in the 1990s to the Japan Communist Party, is perhapsthe reason why this issue was statistically significant at the p < .10 level only.
37. These include the Upper House election of 1998 and the Lower House electionof 2000.
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