Study of voters policy preferences using conjoint analysis

What are the factors of a landslide win of the Liberal Democratic Party in the Lower House of the Japanese Parliament general election held on September 11th, 2005. In this paper, the point is an econometrical position of ‘What is the most preferable public policy? How does this tendency influence to the political party support of voters, voting in elections?’ In order to get a basic knowledge about voters' consciousness towards policy,the research and analysis of a voters' preference tendency to policy as a whole has been done. In particular,the conjoint analysis was implied to the overall policy. It was difficult to quantify policy (overall) evaluation and each policy (individual) evaluation's connection, as before, in 5 levels evaluation, it can fall into an easy result as ‘hospitable service at light taxes’. In reality, we do not evaluate (vote) each policy individually, but we measure a political party (as a combination of policies). Therefore, conjoint analysis is an effective method to quantify a segment (factor) value from an overall value. The results are: the utility of the ideal policy claimed by an opposition party is high, but putting levels into policies of each party, there is a variation in a voters' preference tendency towards a policy package. These results are confirmed by this election, which is a significant finding.