Bradley M. Richardson

European Party Loyalties Revisited

The likelihood that party loyalties reflect the characteristics of parties and political competition within specific political environments was generally ignored in critiques of party identification abroad. In this article, I identify substantial frequencies of stable partisan ties among British, Dutch, and German voters in the 1960s through the 1980s. Stable party loyalists in turn usually vote for their preferred party in subsequent elections. Long-term partisan ties are most common among supporters of traditional cleavage parties. These long-term party loyalties reflect the effects of both long-standing hostilities toward opposing parties and well-developed party principles. Since partisan responses are internally consistent and subsume ideational as well as affective components, these feelings resemble social psychologys affect-laden schemata.

Urbanization and Political Participation: The Case of Japan *

Research has shown that place of residence (urban-rural) has an ambiguous influence on political participation. Japan is one of several major nations in which rural people participate politically more than their urban counterparts. An analysis of urban-rural political attitudes in Japan shows some of the roots of the tendencies in participation. While urban residents are more psychologically involved in national politics, they also tend toward greater pessimism and have lower feelings of the vote being a duty than do their rural counterparts. In contrast, rural voters are highly dutiful in orientation, as well as being strongly involved in local politics and more concerned than urban residents about having their political needs represented. A Coleman effect parameter analysis of the urban-rural attitudes and political participation shows that the attitudes do in fact account for differences in political participation in local politics. But the attitudinal tendencies are less important for national political participation, and it is possible that the older social influence interpretation of Japanese urban-rural differences is most applicable to sectoral trends in this case.

Japan's Habitual Voters Partisanship on the Emotional Periphery

Party identification has been shown to be comparatively weak and volatile in Japan. A search for alternative elements of continuity in partisan behavior indicates that many Japanese vote regularly for the same party, and for roughly one-fifth of the electorate this is done in the absence of a stable party identification. Following earlier work by Ivor Crewe, these nonidentifiers who still vote regularly for the same party are termed habitual voters. Habitual voters are less involved in issues, have fewer party images and have fewer ties to external groups that support their party than stable party identifiers. What makes the habitual voters stand out most is their absence of emotional commitments to the party they vote for regularly in elections and lack of negative feelings toward the parties they do not support. Habitual voting thus reflects one of the dominant traits of Japans political culture, which is a strong tendency toward affective neutrality. Habitual voters are a new type of nonaffective partisan not anticipated in traditional political behavior theories, and as such their presence in Japan should be of interest to students of comparative political behavior.

The Japanese voter

This survey of the major factors that influence voting behaviour in Japan demonstrates, through a wide range of examples, that there are recognizable bases of comparison between Japanese and Western voting behaviour. It also produces a number of contrasts with voting in the West.