Junko Kato and Michael Laver, "Party Policy and Cabinet Portfolios in Japan, 1996," Party Politics, 4 (April 1998), 253-260.

First Paragraph:
The implementation of models of party competition and government for-mation often demands the availability of good data on party positions on a range of key policy dimensions. Of the range of methods that can be used to derive such estimates -- including the content analysis of party manifestos, elite surveys of party politicians, and mass surveys of party voters -- one very convenient method is the expert survey. Early exponents of this technique were Morgan (1976), as well as Castles and Mair (1984; see also 1997); more recent and comprehensive implementations have been reported by Laver and Hunt (1992) as well as Huber and Inglehart (1995). The expert survey technique involves sending a postal questionnaire to a sample or population of political scientists who are knowledgeable about the political system under investigation, asking them to use their best judge-ment to locate the positions of various parties on various policy dimensions.

Figures and Tables:
Table 1: Ten substantive policy scales and their end-points
Table 2: Party policy positions in Japan, 1996
Table 3: Party-specific salience of policy dimensions in Japan, 1996
Table 4: Estimated relative importance of cabinet portfolios in Japan, 1996

Last Paragraph:
Data on party policy positions are not interesting in themselves, of course. They become interesting when used to enable the implementation of some particular model or approach, such as the analysis of government formation in Japan reported elsewhere in this special issue (Kato and Laver, 1998). Nonetheless, we can draw some general methodological lessons from the application of the expert survey technique to the Japanese case. The specific adaptation of the survey form to the Japanese context, its translation into Japanese, and its administration from a Japanese base in the University of Tokyo do appear to have increased the response rate considerably. Combined with the use of a much larger universe of Japan-based experts than in the original Laver-Hunt survey, this has generated far more responses and has resulted in estimated policy positions with much smaller standard errors, which we can thus use with much greater confidence in implementing models of party competition and government formation in Japan.
Above all else, however, the main purpose of this note is to put these data into circulation, in the hope that they may be of interest and use to others who are analysing party politics in contemporary Japan.