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The Intensity of Government–Opposition Divide as Measured through Legislative Speeches and What We Can Learn from It: Analyses of Japanese Parliamentary Debates, 1953–2013

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 July 2018

Luigi Curini Open the ORCID record for Luigi Curini [Opens in a new window] ,
Airo Hino  and
Atsushi Osaka
Luigi Curini*
Affiliation:
Luigi Curini, Department of Social and Political Sciences, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy
Airo Hino
Affiliation:
Airo Hino, Faculty of Political Science and Economics, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan
Atsushi Osaka
Affiliation:
Atsushi Osaka, Rissho University, Tokyo, Japan
*
*Corresponding author. Email: luigi.curini@unimi.it
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Abstract

Through the analysis of legislative speeches made by prime ministers and party representatives in parliamentary sessions in Japan from 1953 to 2013, we argue that it is possible to place parties according to a dimension that captures their confrontational nature within a parliamentary democracy and its evolution over time. Using this dimension extracted via a well-known scaling algorithm (Wordfish), we develop an index of the intensity of the government–opposition divide that is directly related to the dynamics of the electoral cycle of Japanese politics. We then show how this new index greatly facilitates the investigation of two important aspects of Japanese legislative politics (the survival rate of governments and the speed of passage of cabinet bills) compared to a situation in which we focus on more traditional measures capturing the ideological position of the parties alone.

Keywords

legislative speechesgovernment and opposition divideJapanideologyWordfish
Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 55 , Issue 2 , April 2020 , pp. 184 - 201
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2018. Published by Government and Opposition Limited and Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The original version of this article was published with an incorrect author surname. A notice detailing this has been published and the error rectified in the online and print PDF and HTML copies.

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