Talking Like Opposition Parties? Electoral Proximity and Language Styles Employed by Coalition Partners in a Mixed Member Majoritarian System

Abstract

Extant literature has shown that political parties that form a coalition government face one major dilemma; that is, they must govern together but fight elections separately. Thus, coalition members tend to commit to a differentiated strategy as an election approaches. However, existing research has mainly focused on empirical findings from countries with proportional representation and few measures for direct criticism from partners. In order to test the theory, this study examines parliamentary speeches from Japan’s mixed member majoritarian context. It uses a supervised machine learning method for measuring confrontational attitudes toward governments irrespective of their ideologies. The results of this study show that on average, while a coalition partner may present a slightly hostile attitude toward governments in parliamentary speeches, this effect is not influenced by election proximity. This may imply that incentives for managing coalitions could differ in majoritarian-centered electoral systems.