Working Papers

Abstract: 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.