Japanese Public Opinion Data After Shinzo Abe Assassination

Featuring over 640,000 daily responses from a Voting Advice Application (VAA) collected around the 2022 assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. It was used to estimate regional changes in support for Abe's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) using the generalized synthetic control method (GSCM). The data reveals temporary shifts in public opinion in Abe's home region but no lasting effects.

Use Cases

• Analyze daily VAA response patterns to measure changes in LDP support following the political assassination.
• Apply the generalized synthetic control method (GSCM) to compare public opinion trends between the assassination site and Abe's home region.
• Investigate the relationship between psychological proximity to the victim and temporary shifts in support for rights restrictions.
• Examine regional variation in public opinion data collected two days before a national election.

Strengths

• Over 640,000 daily VAA responses provide a high-frequency measure of public opinion.
• Data is specifically tied to a major political event, the 2022 assassination of Shinzo Abe, allowing for causal inference.
• Analysis employs the generalized synthetic control method (GSCM) for robust counterfactual estimation.

Limitations

• The dataset is very small at 1.0 KB, indicating it likely contains aggregated or processed results, not the raw 640,000+ responses.
• Public opinion measurements are limited to users of a specific Voting Advice Application, which may not be representative of the general population.
• The analysis found no persistent regional effects 8-9 months later, limiting conclusions to short-term reactions.

Provenance

Source

Harvard Dataverse, authored by Asano, Taka-aki.

Collection Method

Data gathered from a Voting Advice Application (VAA).

Time Range

Covers the period around the July 2022 assassination and subsequent national election.

Freshness

Data was last updated in March 2026, but the underlying study covers events from 2022.

Geography

Japan, with specific focus on the assassination site and Abe's home region.