IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/eti/dpaper/20034.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Gender Differences in Campaigning under Alternative Voting Systems: Evidence from a Quantitative Text Analysis of Election Manifestos in Japan

Author

Listed:
  • ONO Yoshikuni
  • MIWA Hirofumi

Abstract

We evaluate an important question in the growing literature on women's substantive representation – whether gender differences in candidate issue engagement are robust to institutional environments that encourage policy convergence and "median-voter" chasing. While a growing body of evidence from American- and comparative politics reveals that gender does play a role in voters' evaluations of candidates, long-standing spatial theories and recent empirical work suggest that such candidate differences should disappear in the face of strategic incentives inherent to single-member district races – thereby limiting the potential for a descriptive-substantive link in women's representation. We address this question by leveraging the case of Japan, which allows us to analyze gender differences both before and after a major electoral reform that effected well documented changes in the nature of campaigning. Owing to the consistent and widespread use of candidate manifestos in Japanese elections, the case also enables us to more comprehensively and reliably measure candidate issue engagement than has typically been done in the representation literature. Using recently pioneered methodologies in probabilistic topic modeling on an analysis of over 20 years of general election manifestos, we find significant differences in the issues that male and female candidates use to present themselves to constituents regardless of party affiliation and other attributes. Moreover, we find that these differences remain salient even after the wholesale change from a multi-member district to a single-member district electoral system.

Suggested Citation

  • ONO Yoshikuni & MIWA Hirofumi, 2020. "Gender Differences in Campaigning under Alternative Voting Systems: Evidence from a Quantitative Text Analysis of Election Manifestos in Japan," Discussion papers 20034, Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI).
  • Handle: RePEc:eti:dpaper:20034
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.rieti.go.jp/jp/publications/dp/20e034.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Margaret E. Roberts & Brandon M. Stewart & Dustin Tingley & Christopher Lucas & Jetson Leder‐Luis & Shana Kushner Gadarian & Bethany Albertson & David G. Rand, 2014. "Structural Topic Models for Open‐Ended Survey Responses," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 58(4), pages 1064-1082, October.
    2. Michael J. Hanmer & Kerem Ozan Kalkan, 2013. "Behind the Curve: Clarifying the Best Approach to Calculating Predicted Probabilities and Marginal Effects from Limited Dependent Variable Models," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 57(1), pages 263-277, January.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Thomas Plümper & Eric Neumayer & Katharina Gabriela Pfaff, 2021. "The strategy of protest against Covid‐19 containment policies in Germany," Social Science Quarterly, Southwestern Social Science Association, vol. 102(5), pages 2236-2250, September.
    2. Sandra Wankmüller, 2023. "A comparison of approaches for imbalanced classification problems in the context of retrieving relevant documents for an analysis," Journal of Computational Social Science, Springer, vol. 6(1), pages 91-163, April.
    3. Sakaue, Katsuki, 2018. "Informal fee charge and school choice under a free primary education policy: Panel data evidence from rural Uganda," International Journal of Educational Development, Elsevier, vol. 62(C), pages 112-127.
    4. Everett, Jeff & Shiraz Rahaman, Abu & Neu, Dean & Saxton, Gregory, 2024. "Letters to the editor, institutional experimentation, and the public accounting professional," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 99(C).
    5. Minchul Lee & Min Song, 2020. "Incorporating citation impact into analysis of research trends," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 124(2), pages 1191-1224, August.
    6. Katherine Sawyer & Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham & William Reed, 2017. "The Role of External Support in Civil War Termination," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Peace Science Society (International), vol. 61(6), pages 1174-1202, July.
    7. Grajzl, Peter & Murrell, Peter, 2021. "A machine-learning history of English caselaw and legal ideas prior to the Industrial Revolution I: generating and interpreting the estimates," Journal of Institutional Economics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 17(1), pages 1-19, February.
    8. Dehler-Holland, Joris & Schumacher, Kira & Fichtner, Wolf, 2021. "Topic Modeling Uncovers Shifts in Media Framing of the German Renewable Energy Act," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 2(1).
    9. Marcel Fratzscher & Tobias Heidland & Lukas Menkhoff & Lucio Sarno & Maik Schmeling, 2023. "Foreign Exchange Intervention: A New Database," IMF Economic Review, Palgrave Macmillan;International Monetary Fund, vol. 71(4), pages 852-884, December.
    10. Bokyong Shin & Chaitawat Boonjubun, 2021. "Media and the Meanings of Land: A South Korean Case Study," American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 80(2), pages 381-425, March.
    11. Parijat Chakrabarti & Margaret Frye, 2017. "A mixed-methods framework for analyzing text data: Integrating computational techniques with qualitative methods in demography," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 37(42), pages 1351-1382.
    12. Li Tang & Jennifer Kuzma & Xi Zhang & Xinyu Song & Yin Li & Hongxu Liu & Guangyuan Hu, 2023. "Synthetic biology and governance research in China: a 40-year evolution," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(9), pages 5293-5310, September.
    13. Benjamin E. Bagozzi & Daniel Berliner & Zack W. Almquist, 2021. "When does open government shut? Predicting government responses to citizen information requests," Regulation & Governance, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 15(2), pages 280-297, April.
    14. Han, Chunjia & Yang, Mu & Piterou, Athena, 2021. "Do news media and citizens have the same agenda on COVID-19? an empirical comparison of twitter posts," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 169(C).
    15. Sofia Bapna & Martin Ganco, 2021. "Gender Gaps in Equity Crowdfunding: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 67(5), pages 2679-2710, May.
    16. Premchand Dommaraju & Shawn Wong, 2023. "Transition to first marriage in Thailand: cohort and educational changes," Journal of Population Research, Springer, vol. 40(1), pages 1-16, March.
    17. Celso Brunetti & Marc Joëts & Valérie Mignon, 2023. "Reasons Behind Words: OPEC Narratives and the Oil Market," Working Papers 2023-19, CEPII research center.
    18. Zhang, Han, 2021. "How Using Machine Learning Classification as a Variable in Regression Leads to Attenuation Bias and What to Do About It," SocArXiv 453jk, Center for Open Science.
    19. Ryon, Stephanie Bontrager & Chiricos, Ted & Siennick, Sonja E. & Barrick, Kelle & Bales, William, 2017. "Sentencing in light of collateral consequences: Does age matter?," Journal of Criminal Justice, Elsevier, vol. 53(C), pages 1-11.
    20. Savin, Ivan & Drews, Stefan & van den Bergh, Jeroen, 2021. "Free associations of citizens and scientists with economic and green growth: A computational-linguistics analysis," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 180(C).

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eti:dpaper:20034. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: TANIMOTO, Toko (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/rietijp.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.