Abstract The purpose of this study is to identify factors that determine negative reactions to political comments by celebrities in Japan. In a democratic society, celebrities can serve an important function as intermediaries through whom large numbers of people can encounter diverse points of view. The prevailing atmosphere in Japan has little tolerance for political comments by celebrities, however, as exhibited by the commonly heard assertion that entertainers should not talk about politics. The impact of this atmosphere on democracy itself cannot be ignored. Even so, there has been no previous research in Japan devoted to empirically verifying people’s attitudes toward political comments by celebrities. In this study, a randomized factorial survey experiment has been employed to test three hypotheses concerning the influence of the following factors: (1) the speaker’s status as a celebrity, (2) incongruent political preferences between speaker and listener, and (3) interaction between the speaker’s status as a celebrity and incongruent political preferences between speaker and listener. Based on the results, we have ascertained that political comments by celebrities are more likely to elicit a negative reaction than political comments by non-celebrities and that incongruent political preferences are associated with stronger aversion to such comments. However, the hypothesis that aversion to such comments would be intensified by concern that celebrity influence might popularize views to which the listener is opposed is not supported by the results. The findings of this study have theoretical implications concerning tolerance for diverse viewpoints in Japan’s democratic society and value judgments about political comments.
Okada et al. (Thu,) studied this question.