Gender, partisanship, and political alienation in Japan and the United States.

Abstract

Political alienation, characterized as a lack of faith in government and of a sense of power to influence the political process, has been associated with independent voting and high levels of electoral volatility over time. Much of the work documenting a cross national trend of alienation from politics, however, ignores differences between men and women. This is despite social and structural barriers to women's political involvement that differentiate how men and women interact with the political system, and that imply that women might be more alienated than men. This study draws on survey data collected in Japan and the United States over a period of 25 years, plus the words of Japanese women from seven all-female focus groups, to explore the relationship between political alienation, partisanship, and gender. The focus groups suggest that Japanese women's dissatisfaction extends, not only from the persistence of barriers that make them outsiders to the process, but also from disapproval of the Japanese way of doing politics. Survey data analyses reveal that American and Japanese women share with their male counterparts the perception that political actors break norms. However, women (and independent voters) in both systems are significantly less likely than men to feel that they can do something about it. A significant new finding is that Japanese women who are supporters of new parties have significantly more faith in political actors, feel more efficacious than independents and supporters of traditional parties, and close the gap between themselves and men. I hypothesize that this is because these parties offer visions of an alternative political process. This research suggests that parties in both nations have much to gain through renewed a renewed commitment to a more inclusive political process.