Working Papers

Theories of democratic representation assume that politicians’ constituency-building behavior is shaped by electoral incentives, but causal identification of this relationship is a challenge. We compile detailed data from Japan covering five decades of itemized campaign expenditures, municipality-level votes, and digitized records of parliamentary meetings to investigate how and when vote-seeking incentives shape constituency-building behaviors. Our analysis is based on a difference-in-differences design exploiting within-individual variation stemming from court-induced seat reapportionments (which alter the threshold of exclusion, and hence the size of the constituency needed, to win a seat). The results show that when a district gains [loses] a seat, candidates spend less [more] in campaigns and narrow [broaden] their geographical base of support. In contrast, we find no compelling evidence that legislators respond through participation or policy specialization in parliamentary activities.

Abstract: Low voter information can disadvantage female candidates, especially in commonly used preferential voting systems where intraparty choice reduces the heuristic value of party labels. We argue that such disadvantages can be overcome by (1) providing voters with candidates’ biographical information, and (2) making preference voting compulsory. The former can disabuse voters of (negative) gender stereotypes, while the latter can counteract inequalities in the use of preference voting by men and women, and encourage voters to consider candidate information. We test our expectations with two survey experiments conducted during recent open-list proportional representation elections in Japan, where women’s representation has notoriously lagged. The results confirm that each experimental treatment (information and compulsory preference voting) increases voters’ support for women, both among the actual candidates running and in a conjoint experiment featuring hypothetical candidates. These findings underscore how simple rule changes might reduce barriers to women’s electoral success in preferential voting systems.