Legislative Agenda and Behaviour: A Differentiated Effect of Electoral Reform

• In Event: Electoral Institutions, Candidate Strategy, and Legislative Behavior

Abstract

How do political institutions such as electoral systems and legislative institutions affect legislative agenda and behaviour? Drawing on recent studies exploring the effect of institutional reforms on political elites’ behaviour, this paper investigates how electoral reform and pre-existing legislative institutions have interacted to affect political agenda and behaviour within the Japanese Diet. Japan is a crucial case as many existing studies have already documented the impact of its electoral reform in 1994 on politicians’ behaviour both within and outside the Diet. For example, studies have explored how the electoral reform influenced to direct MPs’ attention to ‘policy’ and away from ‘pork’. This paper adds to the literature by asking whether Japan’s 1994 electoral reform had a differentiated impact on different aspects of legislative agenda/behaviour, depending on the pre-existing organisation of the legislature. In order to investigate the interactive effect of the electoral reform and legislative institutions, this paper constructs a dataset on topics of legislation and parliamentary questions (interpellations and oral questions) in Japan in line with the Comparative Agenda Project codebook using the Large Language Model Claude, and looks into how legislation/questions on primary industries and governmental operations have been impacted.

Authors

• Kento Ohara, University of Oxford

• Kentaro Kawato, University of Tokyo