福元 健太郎

Do candidates garner more votes simply because their names are better recognized? To answer this question, we use elections to the Japanese House of Councillors as a natural experiment. Members are elected in national and local-level districts. To isolate the effect of name recognition on vote choice, we compare the vote shares of national district candidates in high-name-recognition prefectures-which we define as prefectures in which a national candidate shares the same surname as a local district candidate-and the other low-name-recognition prefectures. Our research design addresses internal and external validity problems from which previous studies suffer. We find that national candidates obtain 69% larger vote shares in high-as opposed to low-name-recognition prefectures. This result holds when controlling for idiosyncratic characteristics of national candidates and prefecture-specific surname popularity.

Although numerous get-out-the-vote field experiments have identified the effects of particular mobilization tactics (e.g., canvassing, phone calls, direct mails) on voter turnout, we do not yet have a full understanding of the causal effect of overall mobilization. We study this by leveraging a natural experiment in Japan, in which the timing of a municipal election is as-if randomly assigned. The results show that almost concurrently held municipal elections boost these municipalities' voter turnout in prefectural elections by one to two percentage points. We argue that some unique settings in Japan allow us not only to mitigate omitted variable bias but also to attribute the estimated effect only to mobilization, rather than the effects of cost sharing and psychological stimulus. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

This study discusses a downside of electoral pressure. As elections approach, legislators reduce their effort in legislative activities, albeit while increasing their efficiency. To show this, we propose a new, natural experimental design exploiting staggered legislative election calendars to identify the effect of approaching elections. Two-way natural blocking improves the balance of pretreatments and an instrumental variable approach addresses noncompliance by retirees. Our analysis of the Japanese House of Councillors demonstrates that legislators up for election show up in the chamber less often than those not facing election; however, when they do show up and speak, they tend to speak longer.

This article reconsiders how to judge judicial independence by using the Japanese judicature, one of the allegedly-most dependent judiciary branches. In their influential work, Ramseyer and Rasmusen (2003) argue that judges who once belonged to a leftist group take longer to reach a 'moderately prestigious status' under the long-term conservative rule of Japan. Their method does not, however, deal appropriately with the possibility of judges not reaching this position because the judge dies, retires early, or is still at the early stage of her career. Ramseyer and Rasmusen also mistakenly assume that all judges will eventually obtain this position. This article develops a survival analysis model of judicial careers and attempts to solve the problems of censoring, left truncation, and split population. We also offer a way to utilize a matching procedure to estimate average treatment effects on censored time-to-event as well as event occurrence. We re-analyze a corrected version of Ramseyer and Rasmusen's data using their and our methods. One of the most important findings is that, contrary to what Ramseyer and Rasmusen argue, leftist judges are not discriminated against in terms of the timing of promotion.

Scholars are interested in not just what event happens but also when the event happens. If there is dependence among events or dependence between time and events, however, the currently common methods (e.g., competing risks approaches) produce biased estimates. To deal with these problems, this article proposes a new method of copula-based ordered event history analysis (COEHA). A merit of working with copulas is that, whatever marginal distributions time and event variables follow (including the Cox model), researchers can derive whatever joint distribution exists between the two. Application of the COEHA model to a dataset from civil wars supports two controversial hypotheses. First, as wars become longer, rebel victory becomes more likely but settlement does not (there is dependence between time and events at both tails). Second, stronger rebels make wars shorter but do not necessarily tend to win, as experts predict but fail to establish (rebels' strength shortens time but has no effect on which events occur). Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

本稿の課題は，現代日本政治において世襲議員が何故多いのかを考えるために，得票継承率（ある選挙である候補に投票した有権者のうち，次の選挙でその候補の後継候補にも投票する者の割合）に対する世襲の効果を推定することである。本稿はそのための統計分析の方法として，世襲新人候補と非世襲新人候補を比較することを提唱する。これにより，選挙研究におけるより大きな課題である政党投票と候補者投票の割合も，集計データから分かるようになる。小選挙区の自民党公認候補のデータを分析すると，①世襲新人候補は，前職候補と少なくとも同程度に，非世襲新人候補より有利である，②政党投票の大きさは世襲の効果と同程度だが，候補者投票の存在は確認できない，③世襲候補の特徴である若年や多選それ自体は選挙で有利に働くわけではない，ことが明らかとなった。

We study to what extent the amount of newspaper reports on China and North and South Korea affect how much Japanese like or dislike these countries． Some news is good news， while others are bad news． Thus， we are not sure whether more reports on a country make people either like or dislike the country under consideration （expected value constant hypothesis）． On the other hand， since more reports provide more information， more people change their minds in either direction（variance increase hypothesis）。 We analyze monthly data from 1960 to 2010 and find that these hypotheses are supported． In addition， it turned out that， as trade with a country increases， more peoPle tend to dislike the country in the long run．

In many applications of survival analysis, the risk of an event occurring for one reason is dependent on the risk of the same event occurring for another reason. For example, when politicians suspect they might lose an election, they may strategically choose to retire. In such situations, the often-used multinomial logit model suffers from bias and underestimates the degree of strategic retirement, for example, to what extent poor prior electoral performance diminishes electoral prospects. To address this problem, the present article proposes a systematically dependent competing-risks (SDCR) model of survival analysis. Unlike the frailty model, the SDCR model can also deal with more than two risks. Monte Carlo simulation demonstrates how much the SDCR model reduces bias. Reanalysis of data on U.S. congressional careers (Box-Steffensmeier and Jones 2004) documents the strategic retirement of representatives, indicating that electoral pressure is more effective at turning out incumbents than previously recognized.

Legislative scholars have debated what factors (e.g. divided government) account for the number of important laws a legislative body passes per year. This paper presents a monopoly model for explaining legislative production. It assumes that a legislature adjusts its law production so as to maximize its utility. The model predicts that socioeconomic and political changes increase the marginal benefit of law production, whereas low negotiation costs and ample legislative resources decrease the marginal cost of law production. The model is tested in two ways. The first approach compares the legislatures of 42 developed and developing countries. The second analyzes Japanese lawmaking from 1949 to 1990, using an appropriate method for event count time series data. Both empirical investigations support the model's predictions for legislative production.

本稿は,1947年から1990年までの衆参両院議員を対象として,どのような前歴•属性を持った者が選挙を経て国会議員としてリクルートされるのかという側面と,いつ何故国会議員たることを止めるのかという論点について,国際比較を交えつつ検討する。その際,従来のように議員の前歴を1つに限るのではなく,複数の前歴を考慮することで相互の連関を検討する。その結果,公明党と共産党の引退年齢が若いこと,公明党は若年層•地方議会議員出身が多いこと,社会党において議員ポストが年を経るにつれて労組幹部の上がり職と化していったこと,共産党•民社党は社会党ほど官公労に人材を依存していないこと,地方政治家が国会議員になる上で県会議員を経ることが重みを年々増してきたこと,などが明らかになった。

The Conflict about the Japan U． S． Security Treaty（JUSST）is fought between the Liberal Democratic Party（LDP）and the Japan Socialist Party（JSP）， though disagreement about the Constitution emerged within the LDP， Some LDP members support Taiwan， while others support the People's Republic of China． Postwar settlement was not discussed until the 1980s． These inconsistent partisan divisions d6n't fit with the conventional right－left ideology． These issues differ not only in terms of partisan division but also the policy dimension；the JUSST and the China problem are concerned with the Cold War dimension， while the Constitution and postwar settlement are related to the stateness dimension． Since the Cold War dimension is more salient than the stateness dimension， the partisan division on that issue， the LDP vs． the JSP， was fixed in 1955． As a result， issues of the Constitution and postwar settlement have never been solved．