Sincere versus Strategic Preferences Over Constitutional Revision in Japan

Ideological conflict over revising the postwar constitution has animated party competition in Japan for over fifty years. It subsumes contentious debates over Japan’s wartime imperialism, the role of the Allied Occupation in designing the 1947 constitution, and whether constitutional restraints on having a full-fledged military should be lifted. This issue has gained greater salience since 2012, when the conservative Liberal Democratic Party published a comprehensive proposal for a new constitution. Currently in government, the LDP has made constitutional amendment one of its signature electoral issues. In turn, progressive opposition parties have united behind an anti-revision electoral platform, and public opinion polls show that voters are evenly divided on the issue. This paper uses survey data to compare the preferences of political elites versus the mass public. It focuses in particular on cohort dynamics: do older politicians and voters, with memories of postwar devastation and imperial failure, have differing preferences from younger generations that do not even remember the Cold War? I find that the effects of age are strongly moderated by partisanship. Conservative politicians are uniformly supportive of amendment, but for progressive candidates, support declines with their age. As for the mass public, progressive voters consistently oppose revision, but among conservatives, support increases with their age. What is particularly puzzling is that more than 70% of progressive politicians under 50 years of age support revision, even though only 45% of progressive voters under 50 to do so. I argue that this is related to strategic electoral incentives. Junior politicians with low name recognition and weaker local bases face stronger pressures to appeal to the preferences of the median voter. In Japan, older cohorts form a significant proportion of likely voters, thereby incentivizing younger politicians, regardless of party affiliation, to back constitutional revision.