三輪 洋文

The incumbent-led subversion of democracy represents the most prevalent form of democratic backsliding in recent decades. A central puzzle in this mode of backsliding is why these incumbents enjoy popular support despite their actions against democracy. We address this puzzle using the case of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. Although some Philippine analysts have speculated that his popularity was inflated due to social desirability bias (SDB) among survey respondents, there has been limited empirical examination. Our pre-registered list experiment surveys conducted in February/March 2021 detected SBD-induced overreporting at about 39 percentage points in face-to-face surveys and 28 percentage points in online surveys. We also found that the poor Mindanaoans, and those who believed their neighbors supported Duterte, were more likely to respond according to SDB. These possibly counter-intuitive results should be interpreted with caution because the survey was conducted during the height of the COVID-19 lockdown, and the findings cannot necessarily be extrapolated to the other period of his presidency. Nevertheless, this study suggests that preference falsification could be an alternative explanation for the puzzle of popular incumbents in democratic backsliding.

Growing evidence reveals that candidate issue engagement differs between men and women. However, recent research suggests that individual-level differences among candidates should be small under the strategic incentives inherent in single-member district elections that encourage party rather than personal-vote seeking. We examine whether men and women candidates emphasize different issues in their electoral campaigns and if the magnitude of the gender gap varies under different electoral rules. Our analysis of 7497 Japanese election manifestos spanning more than 20 years, from 1986 to 2009, reveals significant gender differences in the issues candidates emphasize in their electoral campaigns, regardless of party affiliation or other attributes. Moreover, these differences remain salient after an extensive change from a multi-member district to single-member district electoral system.

Political family dynasties are a staple part of Japanese politics. According to one study, Japan has the fourth highest number of dynastic politicians among democratic countries, after Thailand, the Philippines, and Iceland. As a result, many scholars have qualitatively studied how these political families are born and managed. In contrast to the wealth of qualitative studies on this subject, however, few quantitative studies on Japanese political dynasties focus on how voters view them. To understand this question, we conducted two nation-wide surveys. Our major findings are that while the majority of respondents dislike dynastic candidates, they also value certain attributes of those candidates, such as their political networks, their potential for ministerial appointments, and their ability to bring pork projects to their constituencies. These results fill a gap in benchmark information on dynastic politics in Japan and are a departure from existing studies that show Japanese voters are neutral regarding whether a candidate is from a dynastic family in voting decisions.

We add new insights to the party theory of parliamentary debate proposed in Proksch and Slapin’s The Politics of Parliamentary Debate by combining a quantitative replication analysis of floor speeches with a qualitative explanation of the endogenous transformation of two institutions mediating elections and parliamentary speech in the Japanese Diet. Although the House of Representatives in Japan used a single non-transferable vote system with particularly strong personal vote-seeking incentives, our analysis based on a new dataset shows that, contrary to the theory’s predictions, the pattern of speech activities among party leaders and backbenchers is close to that of Germany, which has a party-centered proportional representation system. Such seemingly contradictory results, however, can be consistently understood within the scope of the theory if we consider the patterns of endogenous change in the parliamentary system and party organization. These results highlight the potential for further development of the theory.

Effective message framing motivates individuals to act for and defend human rights. What effective message framing motivates individuals to defend human rights? Recent experiment-based framing studies show that personal frames are more successful than informational or motivational frames in increasing the advocacy activities of human rights organizations. This study tested the justice frame using the Philippine case of extrajudicial executions. Employing internet-based survey experiments, we tested the effects of the justice frame on consensus and action mobilizations as well as the three frames mentioned above. Our results showed that combining justice and the personal frame is more effective. We also examined emotions inflicted by framing. Our results reveal an association between empathy and anger as a reaction that connects exposure to personal frame and mobilization.