Share the Name, Share the Vote A Natural Experiment of Name Recognition

Do candidates garner more votes simply because their names are better recognized? To answer this question, we use elections to the Japanese House of Councillors as a natural experiment. Members are elected in national and local-level districts. To isolate the effect of name recognition on vote choic...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Journal of politics Vol. 80; no. 2; pp. 726 - 730
Main Authors Fukumoto, Kentaro, Miwa, Hirofumi
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Chicago University of Chicago on behalf of the Southern Political Science Association 01.04.2018
University of Chicago Press
Subjects
Acknowledgment
Candidates
Councillors
Districts
Elections
Politics
Popularity
Research design
SHORT ARTICLE
Voter behavior
Voting rights
Japan
recognition heuristic
mere exposure effect
voting
election
Japan
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Summary:Do candidates garner more votes simply because their names are better recognized? To answer this question, we use elections to the Japanese House of Councillors as a natural experiment. Members are elected in national and local-level districts. To isolate the effect of name recognition on vote choice, we compare the vote shares of national district candidates in high-name-recognition prefectures—which we define as prefectures in which a national candidate shares the same surname as a local district candidate—and the other low-name-recognition prefectures. Our research design addresses internal and external validity problems from which previous studies suffer. We find that national candidates obtain 69% larger vote shares in high- as opposed to low-name-recognition prefectures. This result holds when controlling for idiosyncratic characteristics of national candidates and prefecture-specific surname popularity.
ISSN:0022-3816
1468-2508
DOI:10.1086/696622