Center Director: Yoshiaki Kobayashi (Professor, Faculty of Law)
Primary Campus: Mita
Center Overview
The research objective of this center is to build a social science data archive, an urgent task for empirical analysis in the social sciences, and to contribute broadly to researchers both in Japan and abroad. Specifically, we will supplement the vast amount of data accumulated by the principal investigator and co-investigators—including national census data by municipal mesh, election results by municipality, election pledges, laws and judicial precedents, minutes of the National Diet and all prefectural assemblies, and long-term opinion surveys. We will also build a comprehensive data management system that enables multilingual searches in seven languages (Japanese, English, Chinese, Korean, Russian, Indonesian, and Malay), making it accessible to international students and researchers from overseas.
Through this research, we aim for the database to be widely used as the largest database on Japanese politics by researchers not only in political science but also in law, economics, sociology, and other fields, both domestically and internationally, thereby serving to develop the infrastructure for Japanese studies. Furthermore, by consolidating diverse data into a single data archive, we aim to acquire new knowledge through data fusion. As a contemporary demand for the construction of a social science data archive, while empirical analysis of social phenomena has become widespread, further development requires the creation of a data archive where data necessary for empirical analysis is accessible to everyone.
The reasons for this include the following:
When submitting to top-tier international journals, the disclosure of data that allows for the replication of the paper's findings is often a requirement.
Data is often lost upon the completion of research periods or retirement, leading to the inefficient use of research funds.
Valuable data, such as municipal administrative materials from before municipal mergers and judicial precedents after a certain period, is being lost.
Amid the rapid internationalization of academia and the push for data archiving, the difficulty in accessing data related to Japan is cited as one of the reasons for the decline of Japanese studies overseas. In the natural sciences, projects such as the sharing of related data by various academic societies and the biological genetic resource backup project by the National Institute for Basic Biology have been successful. In the humanities, the project to build an international collaborative research network for historical Japanese texts by the National Institute of Japanese Literature is also progressing. In contrast, because the social sciences do not have an Inter-University Research Institute Corporation, a comprehensive data archive including aggregate data has not been built, with efforts limited to partially collecting opinion survey data. To solve these problems, the research objective of this center is to collect data on national censuses, election results, minutes of the National Diet and local assemblies, opinion surveys, laws, and judicial precedents from Japan and other countries, manage it in an XML database, and build a data archive with a multilingual search function (in Japanese, English, Chinese, Korean, Indonesian, Malay, and Russian) to make it accessible to everyone.
In collaboration with the Subcommittee on Political Process, Committee on Political Science, Science Council of Japan, Cabinet Office, and the MEXT Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A) "Construction and Expansion of a Political Data Archive," we held a symposium on the construction and expansion of a social science data archive and presented our research findings both domestically and internationally.
Keywords and Main Research Themes
Data archive, democracy, multilingual search
Fiscal Year 2019 Project Plan
■Continuing Activities from the Previous Fiscal Year: Background, Rationale, and Goals
To explore survey methods that can replace less responsive face-to-face interviews, we will compare three survey methods—face-to-face, mail, and internet—to determine whether internet surveys or mail surveys have less bias compared to face-to-face interviews, and whether this bias is statistically significant.
If internet surveys have less bias than mail surveys when compared to face-to-face interviews, and this bias is not statistically significant, the superiority of internet surveys as an alternative to face-to-face interviews will be established. Furthermore, we will experiment to see to what extent the bias between internet and face-to-face surveys can be minimized by correcting for the skewed attributes of the collected sample.
Specifically, based on a comparison between internet surveys using the same questions as face-to-face surveys conducted in previous fiscal years,
01. If the difference from face-to-face surveys is due to sample bias, we will control the collected sample using a triple quota based on social attributes (gender, age, and urban scale of the residential area) to match the distribution of social attributes in the face-to-face survey's collected sample as closely as possible.
02. If the difference from face-to-face surveys is due to self-selection bias, we will use multi-stage sampling. Then, for each segment combining the three factors of urban scale, gender, and age group, we will estimate the bias in political attitudes (such as voting participation, party support, and political satisfaction) between face-to-face and internet surveys, and between face-to-face and mail surveys, using the data collected from these methods.
If the resulting bias between the methods is within a statistically acceptable range, internet surveys will be established as an alternative survey method to face-to-face interviews. An important objective of this research is to find the optimal sampling method for this purpose.
In case 01, the advantages of internet surveys will remain intact. In case 02, advantages such as implementation costs (excluding sampling costs) and duration will also be preserved.
■New Activity Goals, Content, and Implementation Background for Fiscal Year 2019
Install the election results by municipality and candidate for the 25th regular election of the House of Councillors in 2019.
Conduct the JES VI opinion survey targeting voters nationwide in conjunction with the 25th regular election of the House of Councillors in 2019.
If the 49th general election of the House of Representatives is held concurrently with the 25th regular election of the House of Councillors in fiscal year 2019, install the election results by municipality and candidate for that election.
In collaboration with the Subcommittee on Political Process, Committee on Political Science, Science Council of Japan, Cabinet Office, and the MEXT Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A) "Construction and Expansion of a Political Data Archive," hold a symposium on the construction and expansion of a social science data archive and present the research findings both domestically and internationally.
Fiscal Year 2019 Project Report
■Implementation Details, Research Outcomes, and Degree of Achievement Relative to the Fiscal Year's Project Plan
In fiscal year 2019, the following new activities were conducted.
We installed the election results by municipality and candidate for the 25th regular election of the House of Councillors, held on July 21, 2019.
In conjunction with the 25th regular election of the House of Councillors held on July 21, 2019, we conducted the JES VI opinion survey targeting voters nationwide. Specifically, we conducted the JES VI Wave 2 survey from July 13 to 15 as a pre-election survey for the House of Councillors election. The survey targeted men and women aged 18 and over nationwide. Based on instructions from the Study Group on Voting Behavior, stratification was performed by residential area (block) and urban scale, followed by quotas for gender and age, resulting in 3,000 valid responses. Furthermore, we conducted the JES VI Wave 3 survey from August 2 to August 4 as a post-election survey for the House of Councillors election. This was a panel survey targeting respondents of the JES VI Wave 2 survey, with approximately 1,800 valid responses. The 49th general election of the House of Representatives was not held in conjunction with the 25th regular election of the House of Councillors in fiscal year 2019.
Through a multi-method comparison of opinion surveys, we developed a survey method that can replace conventional face-to-face interviews and published the research findings in the 2019 issue of "Hogaku Kenkyu" (Journal of Law, Politics and Sociology).
With the change of the era name from "Heisei" to "Reiwa" on May 1, 2019, many of the public disclosure systems for the minutes of the 47 prefectural assemblies were modified. We responded by altering and updating our data archive's automatic collection system.
On October 31, 2019, we presented a report titled "Building a Data Archive in the Social Sciences" to the "Committee on the Examination of the Deepening and Promotion of Open Science," a task-specific committee of the Science Council of Japan, Cabinet Office (held at the Science Council of Japan). This was done to disseminate the project's results across all interdisciplinary fields, going beyond the originally planned Subcommittee on Political Process, Committee on Political Science. On the day of the presentation, Juichi Yamagiwa, President of the Science Council of Japan, was also present, and an enthusiastic discussion took place. Based on the report from that day, the aforementioned committee decided to issue "Recommendations for the Deepening and Promotion of Open Science" from the Science Council of Japan, and we participated in drafting it.
On June 22, 2020, an academic exchange symposium was held by faculty from the Keio University Faculty of Law and the College of Social Sciences at Yonsei University. We introduced this project, which garnered significant interest from those affiliated with Yonsei University.
On February 21, 2020, we held a symposium based on the results of joint research with the Graduate School of Public Administration at Seoul National University in South Korea to discuss strategies and challenges for building a data archive in the social sciences and promoting open science. The symposium was attended by Center Director Kobayashi, co-researchers Takeshi Iida (Professor, Faculty of Law, Doshisha University) and Yuta Kamahara (Associate Professor, Yokohama National University), as well as Dean Im and many other professors from the Graduate School of Public Administration at Seoul National University, along with two professors from Hungary.
Based on the above, we were able to exceed the project plan and achieve our goals for fiscal year 2019.
Achievements in Social Contribution, including Published Papers, Conference Presentations, and Events
Number of published papers: 18
Main publication venues: The International Journal of Community Well-Being, Japanese Journal of American Studies
Number of conference presentations: 14 (6 domestic, 8 international)
Events, etc.: Joint Conference with GSPA, Seoul National University, held at the Graduate School of Public Administration, Seoul National University on February 21, 2020.
Notable Achievements through Center Activities
Traditionally, face-to-face interviews and mail surveys have been commonly used to investigate human social behaviors such as consumer behavior, social attitudes, and political consciousness. However, since the enactment of the Act on the Protection of Personal Information, the attitudes of potential survey respondents have changed, leading to an increase in refusals even when interviewers visit. Additionally, with the recent rise in apartment buildings with auto-lock systems, there are more cases where building managers deny entry to interviewers, preventing them from meeting the intended respondents. Furthermore, as more companies switch from face-to-face interviews, which lack immediacy, to telephone surveys for consumer behavior research and other purposes, it has become increasingly difficult for interviewers to make a living solely from face-to-face interviews. This has made it hard to secure interviewers without offering substantial compensation. These combined factors have caused the cost of face-to-face interviews to soar, making it practically difficult to conduct them without top-tier MEXT Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research, such as Specially Promoted Research, New Academic Fields, or Scientific Research (S). Moreover, the decline in response rates for face-to-face interviews due to the circumstances described above introduces bias into the responses. Generally, if the response rate falls below 60%, the discrepancy between the target population and the valid respondents becomes significant, potentially casting doubt on the survey's reliability. For this reason, the survey period for face-to-face interviews is often extended (e.g., to 16 days including three weekends) to secure a certain response rate, which can lead to changes in circumstances between the beginning and end of the survey. This can create problems when analyzing data collected over a long period as a single dataset. Therefore, in this project, we have developed a unique multiple quota method using the same questions to ensure that no statistically significant differences arise between the results of internet surveys and face-to-face interviews. As a result, the internet survey with multiple quotas conducted in this study can not only serve as a viable alternative to face-to-face interviews but also leverages the advantages of internet surveys to respond quickly to events and be conducted at a lower cost. This enables young researchers and graduate students without large research grants to compete on an equal footing with senior researchers. The results of this research were presented at the 2019 annual meeting of the Japanese Political Science Association on October 5, 2019, and received a significant response.
Project Members
Principal Investigator
Yoshiaki Kobayashi
ProfessorFaculty of LawKohei Itoh
ProfessorFaculty of Science and Technology