Abstract
Both political actors and ordinary citizens have long used ideological labels, such as ‘right’ and ‘left’, as a means of summarizing and communicating political information. In many advanced Western democracies, scholars have established and confirmed that these labels are primarily defined by stances on economic issues, namely the degree of government intervention in the economy, complemented in recent years by authoritarian versus libertarian views and attitudes toward globalization. However, the ideological schema in Japan has traditionally been structured by issues in foreign affairs and defense, as well as the related debate over constitutional revision. This chapter investigates which issues Japanese citizens associate with ideological terms, specifically testing four dimensions: foreign and defense policy; economic issues; powers of the central government; and social values, as well as the impact of partisan evaluations on understanding of ideology. While other studies have examined the same topic, this chapter provides longitudinal perspective by analyzing data covering the years 1976–2010.
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Jou, W., Endo, M. (2016). Understanding Ideological Semantics. In: Generational Gap in Japanese Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50342-8_2
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