The Changing Rules for Political Campaigning in Japan

The next session at AoIR 2015 starts with Leslie Tkach-Kawasaki, whose focus is on the use of social media in the 2013 upper house election in Japan. Online campaigning has been studied for some time already, with considerable focus on the impact of technological innovation; such research has found that online practices often mirrored offline practices. Online political marketing in particular has been an extension of traditional offline marketing techniques, and the use of social media for campaign involvement has also been explored recently.

Post-war electoral reforms in Japan set up multimember electoral districts where members of the same party would vie for the same seats. The law also distinguishes between political and campaign activities, and governs the distribution of campaign materials (including geographical distribution, the means and content of messages, and the distribution channels).

The timeline of election campaigns is that the diet is dissolved some 40 days before the election, candidates official file their candidates some 12-17 days before, and an election bulletin containing the candidates' nomination statements is published 7-8 days before the election. The first stage of this (before the official filing) is comparatively open – candidates cannot yet name themselves as candidates, but can hint at their political stances; afterwards, no new Website updates are allowed. By 2013, the vast majority of all upper house candidates had Websites.

The laws were changed in April 2013, however. More campaign-related activities were now allowable (through Twitter, Facebook, Websites, and email), although voters themselves are restricted from forwarding campaign emails to others. Only parties (not candidates) are permitted to buy banner ads, and any dissemination of campaign materials that were printed from material distributed online remains prohibited.

In the 2013 election, 92% of candidates had Websites; 85% Facebook; 71% Twitter; and 34% posted YouTube videos (though many of these were not professionally produced). Some organisations also used a service called LINE (which I take it is a kind of online chatting platform). Overall, this represents a move away from blogs and towards social media; this further personalised the campaign towards the public. There is also an online segmentation: Websites become traditional information repositories, which social media activities draw on.

There's also a social segmentation: regional candidates are focussed more on Facebook than Twitter, for example, and such regional candidates are especially interested in building long-term connections, while Twitter is used more for real-time information about campaign events.