README

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Title
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Open-Ended Questionnaire Regarding Voting Choices in Japan

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Abstract
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While Japanese academic and political opinion is generally agreed that U.S.-inspired models of voter choice are imperfectly adapted to describe the ways in which the Japanese electorate makes its decisions, psephologists remain divided as to precisely how factors affecting Japanese voting patterns should be modelled. In this project we used a large-scale (N=501), open-ended survey to ask voters to describe freely and in detail how they allocate their votes, and how they believe that their fellow citizens make their own decisions. We found the influence of ideology to be so small as to be negligible. Instead, voters were influenced principally by politicians’ perceived managerial skills, past successes and ability to fit in with the spirit of the times. Rather than a grand ideological combat, the vast majority of respondents tended to see elections as being similar in nature to a company or civil service employee performance review. All data and metadata is in Japanese.

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File list
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1. Anonymised Japanese dataset - electoral behaviour.xlsx

This file records 501 responses to a questionnaire about voting behavior in Japan. The survey includes respondent ID numbers, time stamps and multiple choice questions covering consent (yes, no), gender (male, female, prefer not to say), education level (no formal education, primary, secondary, tertiary, prefer not to say), place of residence (rural, small village, mid-size town, large city, prefer not to say), interest levels in local/national/international politics (not interested/somewhat interested/very interested), and age (18-30, 31-40, 41-50, 51-60, 60+). There are two open-ended questions: “What do you take into consideration when voting in general elections? (For example: policies, party image, local issues, the economic situation, the personality of the leaders etc.) How do you make up your mind?” and “From your point of view, do you think that other voters decide in the same way that you do? What do other voters take into consideration? (For example: policies, party image, local issues, the economic situation, the personality of the leaders etc.)” All data is in Japanese. Please note that all data regarding participants who refused content has been redacted, as per the data protection rules governing the survey.

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Variables
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1. A: Respondent ID (number)
2. B: Timestamp (date/time)
3. C: Consent (1,2)
4. D: Consent (yes,no)
5. E: Gender (1, 2, 3)
4. F: Gender (male, female, prefer not to say)
5. G, I, K: Education level (1, 2, 3)
6. H, J, L: Education level (primary, secondary, tertiary)
7. M, O, Q, S: Place of residence (1, 2, 3, 4)
8. N, P, R, T: Place of residence (large city, small town, village, rural)
9. U, W, Y: Interest levels in local politics (1, 2, 3)
10. V, X, Z: Interest levels in local politics (not interested/somewhat interested/very interested)
11. AA, AC, AE: Interest levels in national politics (1, 2, 3)
12. AB, AD, AF: Interest levels in national politics (not interested/somewhat interested/very interested)
13. AG, AI, AK: Interest levels in international politics (1, 2, 3)
14. AH, AJ, AL: Interest levels in international politics (not interested/somewhat interested/very interested)
15. AM, AO, AQ, AS, AU: Age (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
16. AN, AP, AR, AT, AV: Age (18-30, 31-40, 41-50, 50-15, 60+)
17. AW: "What do you take into consideration when voting in general elections? (For example: policies, party image, local issues, the economic situation, the personality of the leaders etc.) How do you make up your mind?" (open ended question)
18. AZ: "From your point of view, do you think that other voters decide in the same way that you do? What do other voters take into consideration? (For example: policies, party image, local issues, the economic situation, the personality of the leaders etc.)" (open ended question)