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

Abstract

The existence of dominant parties in democracies is an enduring puzzle, in part because spatial models of voting suggest that an opposition party should be able to challenge the incumbent by proposing more popular policies. We consider the preeminent case of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and investigate whether its continued success can be explained by voters’ support for its policies. We measure voters’ policy-based utility for parties through a novel application of conjoint experiments featuring policy profiles based on parties’ real-world manifestos and find that these utilities only partially explain vote choice. Most voters prefer the policies of the main opposition parties, but many nevertheless support the LDP. We interpret this discrepancy as arising from the LDP’s advantage in terms of valence (non-policy considerations). An examination of which voters change preferences when policy profiles include party labels suggests that trust is an important component of the LDP’s valence advantage.

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

JEL Classification: D72, C91