The fact that street speeches in local elections increase the popularity of candidates and that the repeated calls of candidate names by election cars affect the number of votes can be seen in research groups such as Professor Asako Miura of Kwansei Gakuin University and Associate Professor Kazunori Inamasu of the Faculty of Sociology. The investigation revealed.The research results were published in the electronic version of the journal "Social Psychology Research" of the Japanese Society of Social Psychology.
According to Kwansei Gakuin University, Professor Miura and his colleagues recorded the movement route and contents of the election campaign of one of the three candidates in the Ako mayoral election in Hyogo prefecture in January 2015, and the attendants recorded it in minutes. The current position of the candidate was recorded in 1-second increments using the Global Positioning System (GPS) app on the smartphone.
Immediately after the polling date, a questionnaire was sent to 2,000 voters, who were randomly selected from the electoral list in two stages, and 908 responded.The survey items were the names of the candidates who voted, their liking for each candidate, their awareness of politics, etc., and analyzed both data to find out how the actual election campaign affected the behavior of voters.
As a result, even if the election car ran near the voter's home, the candidate's liking did not increase, but the more opportunities he had to interact with the candidate in street speeches, the higher his liking for the candidate. ..It was found that voting behavior is influenced by both the fact that the election car runs nearby and the opportunity to interact with the candidate increases, and that the exchange of information concentric with the residents in the neighborhood also has a certain influence.
The research group reiterated that contact with campaigns and interpersonal communication have important implications for voters' political behavior during local elections.
