Populist Sentiment in Japan's 2017 General Election: Evidence from Print and Social Media

Investigating populist sentiments and their expression in Japan offers an opportunity to explore the nature of contemporary populism in a liberal democracy whose social and political context is quite different from that of Europe or North America, adding an extra dimension to discussions of populism as a global phenomenon. While Japan shares the economic crises which form part of the context of the rise of European and North American populism, other contextual factors are very different; the country has seen no major change in immigration policy or ethnic composition, and its political system remains notably stable. However, in contrast to most Western nations, it faces both a challenging external security situation and conflicted relationships with neighbouring nations over issues of history and territory. This paper uses large data sets drawn from Japanese social media (specifically Twitter, the country's most popular social media platform) and national newspapers during the October 2017 general election campaign to explore whether this different context has produced a form of populist expression which matches the definitions being developed in Europe and North America (e.g. assertions of national homogeneity, anti-elite sentiment etc.), a form with different characteristics which remains broadly recognisable as part of the same global phenomenon or - as some experts have argued - no notable populist movement at all. A machine-assisted text analysis approach is employed to identify populist sentiment and language, and trace its movement between politicians, the news media and the electorate. Particular attention is paid to the communicative approaches of new challenger parties which emerged ahead of the 2017 election (one left- and one right-wing), to explore whether they sought to activate or capitalise upon a domestic version of the populist sentiments that had mobilised challenger party support in Western democracies. The research helps to locate the Japanese case within the broader field of the study of populism, and in doing so provides new empirical data points for consideration in the development of a universal conceptual approach to understanding contemporary radical movements.