On the Electoral Consequences of Increasing Chinese Imports: Insights from the Japanese Lower House General Elections, 2009–2017

How does increasing import competition shape domestic politics? Given China’s increasing economic growth and exports, the last several decades have witnessed flourishing debate on how international trade affects domestic politics and local labor markets both in academia and in the realm of policy. This chapter applies the instrumental variable design of Autor et al. (2013) to examine the impacts of the increasing Chinese exports to Japan, including both steel industry-specific increases and increases in all the manufacturing sectors, on the outcomes of Japan’s four national Lower House (Shūgiin) General Elections between 2009 and 2017. Although the present analysis might suffer from several methodological concerns, the estimation results suggest two important patterns. First, naive ordinary least square (OLS) estimates reveal a positive association between import exposure in the steel industry and the vote shares of the ruling coalition and the Liberal Democratic Party. Second, and in contrast to the naive OLS estimates, the positive association becomes invisible once instrumented by Chinese exports to other OECD countries. While the naive comparisons are consistent with popular accounts and suggest evidence of rightward ideological shifts within heavily exposed prefectures, the detected association may not reflect an underlying causality.