Nuanced Voters in Japan: Estimating Transition between Economic and Accountability Voting

Abstract

Recent retrospective voting studies have focused not only on the retrospective economic voting (economic voting), but also on the retrospective accountability voting (accountability voting). Retrospective voting based on voter’s evaluations of economic conditions is considered economic voting, whereas accountability voting is where voters consider the consistency between promises the government makes and what it actually implements. Voters are assumed to waver between economic and accountability voting; this balance informs time-series transitions in relative weight given to each in voting behavior. Referring to such voters as nuanced voters, this research uses the case of Japan’s electoral politics and attempts to determine historical change in retrospective voting patterns. In this study, electoral accountability is set as the deviation of the realized (observed) value from the promised value by the government. Two types of analysis are then conducted: the impulse-response functions between economic/accountability voting and the cabinet approval rate by a Bayesian structural vector autoregressive (B-SVAR) model, and time-series contributions of economic/accountability components for approval ratings by historical decompositions (HDC). Assuming that the weight of economic/accountability voting changed after 1993-94 electoral institutional reform in Japan, a transition in the behavior of nuanced voters was clearly apparent in public works spendings in the private goods sphere. Moreover, according to theoretical expectations, accountability voting in regard to government expenditures and GDP predominated both pre- and post-reform, and neither nuanced change between economic and accountability voting nor critical change after reform were observed.