Voter Switching and Policy Preferences: Evidence from Japan's 2025–2026 Elections

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

This study examines vote switching between Japan’s July 2025 House of Councilors and February 2026 House of Representatives elections. The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) suffered a major defeat in 2025 and then achieved a landslide victory in 2026 under Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, who adopted a moderate but firmly immigration-restrictive platform. Using a survey of 14,000 respondents and multinomial logit and probit models, we analyze party choice and vote switching. The major findings are as follows: (1) anti-consumption-tax attitudes are negatively associated with voting for the LDP and positively associated with voting for the right-wing Sanseito Party; (2) less opposition to foreigners as workplace colleagues relative to neighbors is positively associated with the probability of voting for the right-wing Sanseito Party; and (3) among voters for the right-wing Sanseito Party in 2025, less opposition to foreigners is positively associated with switching to the LDP in 2026.