Politiskt Beteende i Japan: Hör institutionellt förtroende och valdeltagande verkligen ihop? : En kvantitativ analys av World Values Survey 2019

Sammanfattning

Voter turnout in Japan has shown a persistent declining trend in recent years and decades, with parallell consistently low levels of institutional trust. This study analyses the relationship between institutional trust and voter turnout in Japan, as well as whether the relationship differs depending on which political institution the trust is referred to. The theoretical framework consists of a combination of Civic Voluntarism Model and Political Efficacy. The data material is the 7th wave of the World Values Survey, which was conducted in Japan in 2019. The chosen method to analyse the relationship is logistic regression. The results of the analysis show that institutional trust has a significant and positive relationship with voter turnout in Japan, as all three institutional trust variables displayed significant relationships with voter turnout in separate regression models. However, in the combined model, only trust in the government was significant, which is likely a consequence of multicollinearity between the trust variables. No differences of substance were found in the strength of the relationship depending on which institution was considered. As a whole, the results support the original assumptions of both theories in a Japanese context, but low explanatory values indicate that the relationship between institutional trust and voter turnout is complex beyond the predictions of the theories, and that context plays a meaningful role when analysing these types of variables.