Please Vote! Exploring Celebrities' Effect on Mobilising Young Voters in Japan

Nowadays, it is increasingly common to see celebrities featured in political campaign materials, particularly in voter mobilisation campaigns. Through their fame and popularity, governments and campaign organisers aim to capture voters’—especially young voters'—attention and encourage them to participate in elections. To what extent does this work in a politically apathetic context? Does the gender of the celebrity affect its effectiveness? To answer these questions, two original surveys (around 200 respondents per survey), focusing on young voters (i.e., university students), were conducted in Tokyo, Japan, right before the 2022 and 2024 national-level elections. Young people in Japan have long been portrayed as politically uninterested, apathetic, or disengaged, as reflected in their consistently low turnout rates across elections over the decades. Consequently, multiple measures have been implemented, one of which is the employment of celebrities as “characters” on election campaign materials to encourage young voter participation. Cross tabulations and chi-square tests were conducted. Despite this strategy having been used for several years, our findings suggest that neither familiarity with the celebrities nor recognition of their appearance in campaign materials significantly motivated young people to vote or to learn more about the elections. However, young people who were familiar with the male celebrity featured on the materials reported a higher tendency to express interest in learning more about the election and the campaign materials. This study is one of the first that provides evidence of gender-based celebrity effects in mobilising young voters in Japan. It highlights the need for future research and policymakers to consider how celebrities of different genders may have varying impacts on voter mobilisation and on different age groups. Given the study’s small sample size and its sole focus on Tokyo, future research should undertake national surveys with larger respondent numbers to examine these relationships in greater depth.