世論 What Japan Thinks

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last month or two you surely must have heard about the Democratic Party of Japan winning the recent general election. During the run-up, I steered away from publishing polls regarding it as there are blogs out there with much better political coverage than me, and anyway since the election outcome was pretty much a foregone conclusion, I didn’t really find them that interesting.

However, now with the election out of the way, here’s a quick look by iShare at ,a href=”http://release.center.jp/2009/09/1801.html”>expectations for the new Japan. Note that iShare’s monitor demographic is I feel quite geeky, so it may be a bit fraught with danger to extrapolate these results to the general public.

Demographics

Between the 31st of August (the day after the election) to the 3rd of September 2009 523 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private online questionnaire. 56.4% of the sample were male, 32.1% in their twenties, 31.9% in their thirties, and 35.9% in their forties.

For me too uncertainties outweigh expectations. Being a non-car-owner with a full time homemaker wife I fall outside the two large demographics that are going to get benefits thrown at them, and although them promising to cut wasteful public spending is of course a good move (assuming they can achieve their goal, of course) so far all I have seen is measures that put even more people out of work in a time of record unemployment, without a concrete plan for job creation.

Research results

Q1: Did you vote in the general election on the 30th of August? (Sample size=523)

	All	Male N=295	Female N=228
Yes	75.9%	74.9%	77.2%
No	24.1%	25.1%	22.8%

Q2: Over the next four years, in what area are you most expecting something from the Democratic Party of Japan? (Sample size=523)

	All	Male N=295	Female N=228
Economy	16.1%	19.7%	11.4%
Child care, education	8.2%	5.4%	11.8%
Medical, welfare	7.6%	6.1%	9.6%
Work	7.3%	7.5%	7.0%
Lifestyle	4.0%	2.7%	5.7%
International	2.7%	3.7%	1.3%
Regional	0.8%	1.4%	0.0%
Other	10.1%	11.2%	8.8%
Nothing in particular	43.2%	42.4%	44.3%

Q3: Regarding the outcome of the election, do you currently feel expectations or unease more? (Sample size=523)

	All	Male N=295	Female N=228
Expectations	33.3%	37.6%	27.6%
Unease	66.7%	62.4%	72.4%