Takeshi Iida

Dynastic Politicians: Theory and Evidence from Japan

Dynastic politicians, defined as those whose family members have also served in the same position in the past, occupy a sizable portion of offices in many parts of the world. We develop a model of how dynastic politicians with inherited political advantages affect electoral outcomes and policy choices. Our model predicts that, as compared wit non-dynastic legislators, dynastic legislators bring more distributions to the district, enjoy higher electoral success, and harm the economic performance of the districts despite the larger amount of distributive benefits they bring. We test the implications of the model using data from Japan between 1997 and 2007.

Public goods provision experiment with CASI survey

Preface, Aiji Tanaka 1. Introduction, Masaru Kohno and Yoshitaka Nashizawa 2. Survey Modes and Data Quality, Tetsuya Matsubayashi 3. No-Opinion Options and Survey Responses, Tetsuya Matsubayashi 4. Have You Really Not Participated? Social Desirability Bias in the Opposite Direction, Yoshitaka Nishizawa and Koichi Kuriyama 5. Examining Response Order Effects through the Computer Randomization, Ryosuke Imai and Airo Hino 6. What Can We Learn from Response Time?, Kiichiro Arai and Norihiro Mimura 7. Public Goods Provision Experiment with CASI Survey, Kazumi Shimizu, Yuko Morimoto, Motoki Watabe, Takeshi Iida and Koichi Kuriyama

Surging progressives in the conservative mood The conditional effects of income and urbanism on vote choice in the 2014 Japanese Lower House election

This article examines the conditional effects of income and urbanism on vote choice in an attempt to explain why both the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the progressive Japanese Communist Party (JCP) were successful in the 2014 Japanese Lower House election. Casting doubt on the conventional explanations, it argues that social division along income lines caused a polarization of voting in urban areas, which in turn allowed the two parties to prosper in the election. More specifically, Prime Minister Abe’s monetarist economic policies implemented during an economic downturn influenced the welfare of people differently according to income level, and consequently divided them into voters for the LDP and for the JCP. Using Japan as a case study, this research shows how an economic policy implemented during an economic downturn can create social and political divisions among people, which in turn impacts elections.