| Abstract: | Voters make their choices based on an interaction between their preferences and the options available. One cannot vote for a candidate or a party that is not running in one's district. Voting research has heretofore focused almost exclusively upon voter preferences, assuming that all the relevant options are available to all voters. In this paper, we seek to redress the balance somewhat by focusing on variation in the options available to voters in the 1993 Japanese general election. In that election, three new parties ran and were themselves a major issue in the campaign. Voters were asked to express themselves on the question, “should we break the mold of postwar politics by voting for a new party?” We demonstrate that electoral results and voting behavior both varied significantly between those electoral districts with, and those without, a new party option. There were, in effect, two elections in 1993, one in which voters chose between new and established parties and another in which voters chose from among the established parties only. We argue that one cannot assume that an electoral outcome reflects the “will of the people” without adding the important caveat, “given the available alternatives”. |
