Airo Hino

This book provides a systematic and comparative account of the rise of ‘new challenger parties’ across Western Europe. It analyses how parties that challenge the conventional party system by addressing issues neglected by existing parties can succeed and fail. Systematically comparing 229 elections since 1950 across 15 European democracies, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, the Benelux and Scandinavian countries, this book questions why new challenger parties are more success

The rising popularity of social media posts, most notably Twitter posts, as a data source for social science research poses significant problems with regard to access to representative, high-quality data for analysis. Cheap, publicly available data such as that obtained from Twitter's public application programming interfaces is often of low quality, while high-quality data is expensive both financially and computationally. Moreover, data is often available only in real-time, making post-hoc ana

The pros and cons of ranking and rating scales have been much discussed. It is widely accepted that factor analysis based on ranking scales suffers from a negativity bias, while that based on rating scales in turn suffers from a positivity bias. Recent decades have witnessed an increasing sophistication in techniques of neutralizing these biases in factor analysis. Using data from an experimental survey of postmaterialist values conducted in Japan, we applied these techniques and compared the di

Abstract The assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzō Abe in July had an enormous impact on politics in Japan in 2022, with subsequent recriminations regarding connections between ruling party lawmakers and the controversial Unification Church new religious movement leading to public outcry and forcing Prime Minister Kishida to remove several high-profile Ministers from his Cabinet. There was contentious debate over whether a state funeral should be held for Abe, and a new law was passed re

The coalition of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the Clean Government Party (CGP) led by Prime Minister Shinzō Abe maintained relatively high approval rates (by Japanese standards) throughout the year and, in November, Abe made the somewhat unexpected decision to call a snap election. The general election for the House of Representatives on 14 December resulted in a further four-year mandate for Abe.

Abstract The year 2021 saw the resignation of Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga after just a year in office, following steep declines in his government's approval ratings due to public dissatisfaction with aspects of his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Tokyo Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games. His successor, former Minister for Foreign Affairs Fumio Kishida, was nonetheless able to limit the ruling party's losses in a general election in late October, preventing the left-wing opposition p

This paper aims to put the classic debate on ranking and rating methods in survey research into retest by re-examining the famous Inglehart batteries of post-materialist value orientation. To this end, we applied an experimental design of split-sampling for both ranking and rating items. The ‘ranking vs. rating ’ debate revisits, on one hand, the oft-neglected danger with ranking measurement that factor analysis becomes biased due to its ipsative property, and, on the other hand, the danger of ‘