Winning Elections with Unpopular Policies: Valence Advantage and Single-Party Dominance in Japan

Abstract

An enduring puzzle in comparative politics is why voters in some democracies continuously support dominant parties in elections, and whether their support is based on policy congruence or non-policy factors like valence. We consider the preeminent case of a dominant party---Japan's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)---and investigate whether voters' support for its policies can explain its recent landslide election victories. We first introduce a new measurement strategy to infer individuals' utility for parties' policy platforms from conjoint experiments. Using this measure, we then show that many voters supported the LDP in the 2017 and 2021 elections despite preferring the opposition's policies. To understand what accounts for this disconnect, we experimentally manipulate party label and decompose its effect, revealing that trust is an important non-policy factor motivating LDP voters. Together, our findings support the argument that the LDP's recent dominance can be attributed to its valence advantage over the opposition rather than voters' support for its policies.

Keywords: spatial voting, policy voting, valence, conjoint analysis, dominant parties, Japan

JEL Classification: D72, C91