Cabinet Support Rate

Taro Asou became the prime minister of Japan after Yasuo Fukuda's sudden resignation.

As usual, Newspaper companies started the "cabinet support rate survey" (内閣支持率調査, Naikaku Shijiritsu chousa) .


**Asou's cabinet support rate (compared with Fukuda/Abe)**



Jiji press article[ja]
Nikkei article[ja]
Yomiuriarticle[ja]
Asahiarticle[ja]
Mainichi article[ja]
Sankei/FNN article[ja]


You can see how different the numbers are, based on which newspaper company did the survey. Nikkei result says Asou has 53% support rate whereas Sankei's number is 44.6%- 10 points lower than Nikkei. This has become a debate in people interested in surveys - there could be various factors that made this difference - it could be due to how the questions were phrased, what method they did the survey (some are telephone interview, some are F2F, etc), what time they did the survey, whether it was weekday or weekend, etc.

This is the latest political party support rate.
Yomiuri's result says DPJ has 22.8% whereas Nikkei has a score 10 point higher- 33%.

**Party support rate**



**Abbreviations I used for the political parties**

LDP - Liberal Democratic Party
DPJ - Democratic Party of Japan
Komei - New Clean Government Party
JCP - Japan Communist Party
SDP - Social Democratic Party
PNP - The People's New Party
NPN - New Party Nippon

Following is the historical chart of the cabinet support rate of prime ministers... I listed the data of Yomiuri and Asahi.

**Historical Cabinet Support Rate**





This debate is nothing new however- this article on J-Cast pointed out the difference of the survey results conducted after the cabinet reform of Fukuda last month (Survey period was 2008/8/1-8/2)

**Cabinet support rate differences (this data is from 2008/8/1-8/2)**



* "point change" refers to the comparison between the survey result from last time and this time.


There was a huge difference in those numbers here too.



Whichever company's data you use, certain facts- such as the fact that Asou's cabinet support rate is lower than what LDP expected- lower than recent prime ministers such as Abe and Fukuda- does not change.

2010/4/30 update:

Sankei/FNN did a cabinet support rate survey on 4/24-25 and the result was as follows. Blue line is support rate of Hatoyama cabinet (which fell from 68.7% last September to 22.2% this April), red line is non-support rate...