Yasushi Kudo’s Opinion Poll Analysis: Part1 – Two Things to Note Before Analyzing The Results of the Opinion Poll.

During the busy period at the end of last year, many people took the time to answer our opinion poll and even now, well into the first month of the New Year, completed surveys are still being sent to our office. Eventually we intend to incorporate these into our analysis too but for now, please allow us to publish the compiled results for the first 350 respondents to our opinion poll.

When conducting an opinion poll it is sometimes very easy to become over critical, all the more so because Japanese people find it difficult to praise people. However, even if we put this characteristic aside we can still see that discontent has spread to many other aspects of Shinzo Abe’s government. The greatest reason for this, as was also made clear by our opinion poll, was the lack of a strong and clear message from the government to the Japanese people.

That governing is not just a case of rhetoric, eloquence and style was demonstrated by the fact that the only area in which the Mr. Abe scored highly in our opinion poll was in the point “The Prime Minister’s Personality”. Essentially people can still not see what Mr. Abe’s agenda is, what he has to say as an individual politician and of course how he is going to accomplish these policies.

In this point, we again and again received particularly harsh comments from the respondents. “It’s obvious that the government lacks the ability”, “Rather than his opinions, all I can make out are his tactics to win July’s House of Councilors election” and so on and so forth. I personally am not inclined to condemn the government in this way just yet, however, numerous mistakes such as the town meetings issue and the ensuing disarray of the creation of a core leadership team in the Prime Minister’s office have deeply disappointed respondents to the point where they are no longer willing to forgive this game of trial and error.

Before embarking on the analysis of this opinion poll, please allow me to say two things.

Firstly, strictly speaking, this opinion poll itself was less an assessment of the first 100 days of Shinzo Abe’s government than it was a first impression of it.

Nonetheless this impression issues from very close to the political scene. Given that the opinion poll was answered by government officials and a particular group of journalists, then within this evaluation there is a certain degree of opinions based on first hand information. On this occasion distributing the opinion poll to those who are seen to represent the present and future architects of the Japanese political market places limits on the overall impression, however, we really felt it necessary to collate the opinions of those who are currently active in the political arena.

Obviously in order to analyze the results it is essential to have clear evaluation criteria and systemized questions to allow for such an evaluation. We wanted our questions to incorporate in several aspects the criteria that Genron NPO uses for its own manifesto assessment work so that we could come as close as possible to producing a sound assessment. For that reason we decided to apply a scoring system to analyze the opinion poll and in doing so we also succeeded to a certain degree in finding a novel approach to this project.

Each year Genron NPO publishes an assessment of the ruling party’s manifesto and the realization of the policies that it set forth. Essentially the results of this opinion poll are just the electorate’s impression of the present government but we do not intend our project to end there. The outcome of this opinion poll will be incorporated into our real manifesto assessment project in preparation for the July House of Councilors election and then published on our website.

Secondly, this opinion poll was by no means carried out in order to criticize the government. The government is chosen by the electorate and so, we wanted to take this opportunity to encourage the electorate to take part in the government.

In an advanced democratic society the observation of the government takes several forms and not just that of the media. In reality CNN in America carried out a similar sort of assessment of the Bush administration and this is not a rare practice in other parts of the world either. My aims are to create a constructive atmosphere of tension between the electorate and the Japanese government.

Naturally Mr. Shinzo Abe’s government did not expect to be assessed after only 100 days of being in office. However, it is clear that the electorate is extremely critical of his administration thus far. If our opinion poll causes Shinzo Abe’s government to take this into consideration then it will have been a success. Other questions that arise are: How will Shinzo Abe’s administration get to grips with the issues that were raised in our opinion poll before the election of the House of Councilors in July? What issues will be reflected in his policy making process and how will this be done? If these points are not made clear then our assessment will become all the more critical.

Now that I have explained our position and intentions we can begin analyzing the results of the opinion poll.

to be continued...

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