On the Causes of Youth Underrepresentation in Japan
Abstract
This thesis explores the causes of youth underrepresentation in the Japanese Diet. While young people are severely underrepresented in Japanese parliament, its reasons are still unclear. Using a comprehensive, candidate-level dataset of the Japanese House of Representatives elections from 1947 to 2017, I attempt to answer the question from the perspectives of three groups of actors: voters, political parties, and candidates. First, I introduce an observational study on the relationship between candidates’ age and their electoral performance. It finds no evidence that voters discriminate against young candidates for their age. Second, I examine parties’ nomination patterns in the proportional representation (PR) blocs. I find that candidates’ age is not substantially related to their position in party lists or the electoral prospect of the list rank given to them, suggesting that parties are not biased against young candidates. Third, I investigate candidates’ timing of entry to parliament conditional on their prior experience, attributes, and recruitment paths. I find that, while some professions and background are associated with earlier entry, there is a lack of “fast-tracks” to parliament, a potential cause of the underrepresentation problem in the country.
Note
I submitted this paper to the University of Tokyo as my undergraduate senior thesis in March 2024. Please contact me for the full paper. Replication data for this paper is available here.