The purpose of this paper is twofold. The first purpose is to present features of Japanese
constituency preferences for income redistribution policy as well as measured effects of
the aftermath of the Great Earthquake of Eastern Japan on these preferences. These
analyses exploited the results of the JHPS survey which was conducted in 2011 and
2012. The second purpose is to present the advantages of the JHPS questionnaire on
constituency preference for income redistribution over the similar questionnaires in
other surveys (the General Social Survey, European Social Survey and World Value
Survey) using the measurement results noted above.
The brief results can be summarized as follows.First, the analysis shows that
constituency preferences for tax and for social security benefits are not necessarily
symmetrical.The term ``symmetrical'' here means that the effects of certain observed
characteristics of each respondent's preference for tax and that for social security
benefits are opposite in direction to each other and that both effects are statistically
significant.This result shows advantage of surveying constituency preferences for tax
and for social security benefits separately.Second, the Difference in Differences (DID) ---
where the treatment group consists of respondents in the areas where the aftermath of
the Great Earthquake of Eastern Japan in 2011 was severe, and the control group
consists of respondents in other areas --- shows no statistically significant difference in
preference between the two groups.