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Internet Election Campaigns in the United States, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan pp 115–136Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Is the Power of Online Campaigning in Japanese Electoral Politics a Myth? A Causal Inference Analysis of the 2013 Upper House Election

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Part of the book series: Political Campaigning and Communication ((PCC))

Abstract

Does the active use of social media for political communication during an election campaign enhance political efficacy and facilitate voter turnout? Focusing on Japan, where the ban on using the Internet for national election campaigning was lifted in 2013 for the House of Councillors elections that year, this chapter examines the causal impact of social media use for political communication on democratic virtues. Causal inference using nationally representative survey data and propensity score matching demonstrated a statistically significant positive impact of social media use on political efficacy and voting, which cannot be reliably detected with traditional ordinary least square regressions. Implications for Japanese politics are discussed.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This survey was fielded with financial support from a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (KAKENHI), project number 21223001, PI Ken’ichi Ikeda). I would like to express my deep gratitude for the use of the data.

  2. 2.

    The turnout among the sample for this study far exceeds that of the 2013 House of Councillors Election (52.61%). This is a well-known bias in survey data that rely on self-reporting (Holbrook and Krosnick 2013). It is possible to weight the results back to the distribution of population, but I did not do so because this study focuses on a subsample of data to match propensity scores, so the representativeness of the data was undermined anyway.

  3. 3.

    The Zelig package for R was used for estimation of treatment effects (Imai et al. 2009).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Media and Communication, City University of Hong Kong, 5/F, Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre, 18 Tat Hong Avenue, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong

    Tetsuro Kobayashi

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  1. Tetsuro Kobayashi
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information and Communication, Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan

    Shoko Kiyohara

  2. Department of Global Studies, Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan

    Kazuhiro Maeshima

  3. Communication, Culture, and Technology, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., USA

    Diana Owen

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Kobayashi, T. (2018). Is the Power of Online Campaigning in Japanese Electoral Politics a Myth? A Causal Inference Analysis of the 2013 Upper House Election. In: Kiyohara, S., Maeshima, K., Owen, D. (eds) Internet Election Campaigns in the United States, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Political Campaigning and Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63682-5_5

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