Recent Research

Abstract: Does war enhance or impede the long-term community-level development of social capital? While wartime mobilization and collective-action efforts might strengthen social ties, extreme destruction can potentially erase these effects. We use historical aerial photographs taken after the indiscriminate firebombing of Tokyo during World War II to measure conditionally independent micro-variation in neighborhood-level damages, and investigate the relationship between the amount of damages sustained and the present-day strength of neighborhood associations, a key indicator of geographically-rooted social capital. Even after decades of population recovery, economic growth, and transformations of the urban space, the most heavily damaged neighborhoods continue to have less-organized neighborhood associations, and also exhibit lower socioeconomic well-being in terms of education, occupation, and residential stability. These findings are consistent with the idea that the social capital of survivors is a crucial ingredient for postwar recovery: when fewer survivors remain, communities can potentially be set on a path of persistent disadvantage.

Abstract: The hereditary transfer of political power within families is a prominent feature of premodern societies and persists in some form even in modern democracies. This chapter reviews the role of dynasties in the historical development of states and how patterns in dynastic politics serve as a useful metric for understanding the evolution of power and state organization in historical political economy research. The chapter identifies and describes three broad declines in the role of dynasties in politics: (1) a decline of monarchy in favor of democracy and other forms of government, (2) a decline in the prevalence of elected members of dynasties in democracies, and (3) a decline in the gendered differences in dynastic entry into politics. Despite these general declines, dynastic ties remain advantageous to politicians’ careers in many countries, especially when it comes to reaching the top echelons of power in the executive.

Abstract: A key feature of parliamentary democracy is government accountability vis-à-vis the legislature, but the important question of who speaks for the government—cabinet ministers or unelected bureaucrats, and the institutional underpinnings of this behavior—receives scant attention in the existing literature. We investigate this question using the case of Japan, and data on more than four million committee speeches spanning distinct electoral and legislative institutional environments. We document how a party-strengthening electoral system reform in 1994 facilitated a dramatic shift in the nature of government accountability to parliamentary committees: speeches by ministers increased, speeches by bureaucrats decreased, and discursive accountability between ministers and opposition legislators increased. Subsequent legislative reforms expanding junior ministerial roles and placing explicit limits on bureaucratic participation further reinforced the effects. These findings shed new light on the institutional foundations of responsible party government in general as well as its progressive development in Japan.

Abstract: Around the world, humans are living longer and politicians are getting older. But what do voters think about politicians of advanced age? We conduct a meta-analysis of 16 conjoint design-based candidate-choice experiments in seven democracies, revealing that older hypothetical candidates are consistently less likely to be favored by respondents—whether compared to the youngest alternative or the second-oldest alternative. We then report the findings of a novel conjoint experiment on Japanese voters designed to elicit whether the milestone of entering a new decade of age (70 vs. 69 years) affects respondents’ preferences for hypothetical candidates. Although at most 730 days separate candidates of these ages (limiting concerns of substantial differences in health or fitness), we find a significant penalty for the older candidate. Together, our findings highlight the mismatch between voters’ preferences for younger politicians and the ostensible gerontocracy that governs much of the world.

Abstract: How do parties motivate candidates to exert effort in closed-list elections, where seat outcomes are uncertain only for candidates in marginal list positions? We argue that parties can solve this moral hazard problem by committing ex ante to allocate higher offices in government, such as cabinet portfolios, monotonically with list rank. Under this schedule of compensation, parties have incentives to rank candidates in order of quality (under some conditions) and candidates have incentives to increase the volume and geo-diversity of their campaign efforts as their rank improves. Using detailed data on Norwegian candidates and their use of mass and social media in recent elections, we confirm that (1) candidate quality increases with list rank, and (2) candidates in safer ranks shift from intra-district to extra-district and national media exposure—a composition of effort that can increase their party’s chance of entering government, and thus their own potential share of the spoils.

Abstract: We examine whether and how intergovernmental fiscal transfers reduce crime, an important but understudied aspect of distributive politics. Estimating the causal effect of redistribution on crime is complicated by the problem of simultaneity: transfers may be targeted precisely where crime is a problem. Our research design takes advantage of municipality-level panel data from Japan spanning a major electoral system reform that reduced the level of malapportionment across districts. This provides an opportunity to use the change in malapportionment as an instrumental variable (IV), as malapportionment affects redistribution outcomes, but the change caused by the reform is orthogonal to local crime rates. Naïve OLS estimates show negligible (near zero) effects of transfers on crime, whereas the IV results reveal larger negative effects. This finding supports the argument that redistribution can reduce crime, and introduces a new perspective on the relationship between Japan’s well-known pattern of distributive politics and its comparatively low crime rates.

Abstract: We investigate whether geographic representation affects local voting behavior in closed-list proportional representation (PR) systems, where conventional theoretical wisdom suggests a limited role of localism in voter preferences. Using detailed data on Norwegian parliamentary candidates' hometowns, we show that parties engage in geographic balancing when constructing candidate lists. However, because most districts contain more municipalities than seats, not all municipalities will ultimately see a local candidate elected. A regression discontinuity design applied to marginal candidates reveals that parties obtain higher within-district support in subsequent elections in incumbents' hometowns—novel evidence of "friends-and-neighbors" voting in an otherwise party-centered environment. Exploring the mechanisms, we find that represented municipalities often continue to have locally-connected candidates in top positions, in contrast to municipalities with losing candidates, and are more frequently referenced in legislative speeches. There is no evidence that unequal representation creates inequalities in distributive policies.

Abstract: Throughout history and across countries, women appear more likely than men to enter politics on the heels of a close family relative or spouse. To explain this dynastic bias in women’s representation, we introduce a theory that integrates political selection decisions with informational inequalities across social groups. Candidates with dynastic ties benefit from the established reputations of their predecessors, but these signals of quality are more important to political newcomers such as women. Legislator-level data from twelve democracies and candidate-level data from Ireland and Sweden support the idea that dynastic ties are differentially more helpful to women, and that the quality of predecessors may be more relevant for the entry and evaluation of female successors than their male counterparts. The role of informational inequalities is also reflected in the declining dynastic bias over time (as more women enter politics), and in the differential effect of a gender quota across Swedish municipalities.

Abstract: This chapter explores patterns in legislative speech in the House of Representatives of Japan from 1996 to 2017. In the two main arenas of legislative debate—plenary sessions and committee meetings—the interparty dimension of speech is characterized by the disproportionate share of speaking activity by opposition parties, as well as the dominant Liberal Democratic Party’s junior coalition partner, Kōmeitō. Within parties, senior members and leaders speak more than others in plenary debates, where debate time is more limited. Backbenchers, including those who lost a single-member district (SMD) race but won a seat through the proportional representation (PR) tier of the mixed-member majoritarian electoral system, are relatively more active in committees. Women are not significantly underrepresented in speaking activity in either arena.

Abstract: The concept of electoral competition plays a central role in many subfields of political science, but no consensus exists on how to measure it. One key challenge is how to conceptualize and measure electoral competitiveness at the district level across alternative electoral systems. Recent efforts to meet this challenge have introduced general measures of competitiveness which rest on explicit calculations about how votes translate into seats, but also implicit assumptions about how effort maps into votes (and how costly effort is). We investigate how assumptions about the effort-to-votes mapping affect the units in which competitiveness is best measured, arguing in favor of vote-share-denominated measures and against vote-share-per-seat measures. Whether elections under multimember proportional representation systems are judged more or less competitive than single-member plurality or runoff elections depends directly on the units in which competitiveness is assessed (and hence on assumptions about how effort maps into votes).

Abstract: Although politicians’ personal attributes are an important component of elections and representation, few studies have rigorously investigated which attributes are most relevant in shaping voters’ preferences for politicians, or whether these preferences vary across different electoral system contexts. We investigate these questions with a conjoint survey experiment using the case of Japan’s mixed-member bicameral system. We find that the attributes preferred by voters are not entirely consistent with the observed attributes of actual politicians. Moreover, voters’ preferences do not vary when asked to consider representation under different electoral system contexts, whereas the observed attributes of politicians do vary across these contexts. These findings point to the role of factors beyond voters’ sincere preferences, such as parties’ recruitment strategies, the effect of electoral rules on the salience of the personal vote, and the availability of different types of politicians, in determining the nature of representation.