Individual and contextual determinants of adoption of online media services in the 2017 lower house election campaign in Japan☆
Introduction
Japan has a modern Internet infrastructure with high-speed Internet bandwidth. Slightly more than 80% of the general population had adopted the Internet as of 2017. Twitter is popular among Japanese people, surpassing Facebook, and Instagram (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications 2018a). It is particularly popular among younger generations, such as teenagers and people in their twenties (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, 2018b). Yet despite the high Internet bandwidth and adoption rates (Akamai, 2017), Internet campaigning is relatively new in Japan. Until April 2013, campaigning for public office via the Internet was deemed illegal under the restrictions imposed by the Public Offices Election Law (POEL or Kōshoku senkyo hō) because of stringent regulations concerning the distribution of campaign materials. Since the advent of the use of the Internet in political campaigns in Japan in the late 1990s, candidates were unable to update their websites with current information and unable to use social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to promote their candidacies during the “election campaign activities” period immediately before an election. When the POEL was amended in April 2013, it allowed Internet-based campaigning during the critical 9-to-14-day period immediately before election day. Nowadays, candidates can choose among multiple online media services for campaigning, with the most important online media services being regular websites, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and weblogs. This study uses the term “online media services” as a catch-all term for traditional websites, weblogs, and social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube).
Although the adoption of online media services has been studied before, the pattern of adopting multiple services has been largely ignored. Furthermore, Japan has a complicated election system (Mixed Member Majoritarian system), which uses different candidate lists at the national and district levels (Nemoto, 2018). This makes studying digital campaigning in Japan an interesting case, compared to some other countries (the United States, Germany, France, and the Netherlands) with less stringent campaign legislation and a longer history of Internet-based election campaigning. The research questions for this study are as follows:
- 1.
To what extent do Japanese political candidates adopt online media in general?
- 2.
What patterns can be distinguished in how individual Japanese candidates adopt multiple online media services?
- 3.
How can individual candidate characteristics and contextual factors (electoral competition and audience characteristics) explain the adoption of online media for campaigning?
After briefly outlining the political context of the 2017 elections in Japan in the next section, hypotheses are developed to understand why online media services are adopted.
Section snippets
The political context of the 2017 elections in Japan
The October 2017 election could be termed a “snap election.” In September 2017, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called for a general election to be held on October 22, 2017. Calling a snap election at this time had some benefits for Prime Minister Abe: Despite steadily declining personal approval rates since 2013 and exacerbated scandals in 2016 (Reynolds, 2017), overall, Abe’s policies were supported. At the same time, concern about North Korean threats suggests that Abe could have been focusing on
Theory
Online media services are tools for politicians and candidates to conduct personal election campaigns alongside those of political parties (Karlsen and Skogerbø, 2015). This is the case even in party-centered election systems (Enli and Skogerbø, 2013) and serves mainly to increase their visibility. Online media services representing the new age of political communication are mostly oriented towards personalized campaigning, using microtargeting to reach undecided voters. Previous research shows
Data collection
The current study combined data from new and existing data sets. For all 1180 candidates in the Japan 2017 elections, media adoption was determined for the following online media services: Website, weblog, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Using the official candidate lists posted on the local election management board websites in election districts, data for all 1180 candidates were collected. Age composition in prefectures was retrieved from Statistics Japan (2016). Contextual data about
Descriptive analysis: Adoption patterns of social media
The first research question asked what the adoption rates for social media are among Japanese candidates. Fig. 2 shows the adoption rates for online media services. Websites and Facebook were most popular to adopt, followed by Twitter, while a weblog and YouTube were least popular to adopt.
Given these adoption rates, Research Question 2 asked to what extent the adoption of campaign media showed a consistent pattern of adoption of online media services for candidates. Fig. 3 shows the
Discussion
The goal of the current study was threefold. Research Question 1 asked to what extent candidates adopted online media services. Candidates most widely adopted websites and Facebook (over 60%), and least adopted blogs and YouTube (<26%). Research Question 2 asked whether specific adoption patterns of online media services existed. This study showed that online media services were not adopted independently from each other. Instead, candidates showed a consistent adoption pattern, starting with
Conclusion
The current study contributes to knowledge about candidates’ adoption of online media for election campaigning. The findings show that the adoption of several services simultaneously is a much more powerful approach. Including multiple measurements of adopting online media services are beneficial for several reasons. First, by including multiple measures, the measurement of candidates’ propensity to adopt online media technology for campaigning is more reliable as compared to single-item
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
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