Casual Cynics or Disillusioned Democrats? Political Alienation in Japan Ikuo Kabashima Faculty of Law, University of Tokyo Jonathan Marshall Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley Takayoshi Uekami and Dae-Song Hyun Faculty of Law, University of Tokyo This paper examines the structure of political alienation among Japanese eligible voters, using data from the first, second, fifth, and sixth waves of the seven-wave Japanese Electoral Survey II (JES II). Political alienation can be expressed as comprising two dimensions, political trust and civic-mindedness. Males and people with more years of schooling are more allegiant in general; that is, they are both more trusting and more civic-minded. Evaluations of cabinet performance and support for democratic mechanisms are strongly related to political trust and civic-mindedness. Supporters of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) are no more civic-minded than average but are more trusting politically, whereas Japan Communist Party supporters are more civic-minded but a good deal less politically trusting than average. Independents are below the overall average on both the political trust and civic-mindedness dimensions. Even though party support is unstable, Japan’s political system will not lose its stability as long as LDP supporters and independents constitute the majority of Japan’s electorate. The advent of a new party capable of providing an alternative to the LDP is important to the future of Japanese democracy. KEY WORDS: political alienation, Japan, political trust, political efficacy, party identification. Japanese voters have long expressed dissatisfaction with politics. Generally low levels of trust in government and lack of a sense of effectiveness among Japanese voters hardly come as a surprise to specialists in Japanese politics or to the reading public. Closer analysis of Japanese voters’ sense of alienation supports existing explanations developed for political alienation in a different national Political Psychology, Vol. 21, No. 4, 2000 779 0162-895X © 2000 International Society of Political Psychology Published by Blackwell Publishers, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK.