Wesleyan: Deepening U.S.-Japan Ties Beyond Security

I visited Wesleyan University to join this great symposium on deepening U.S.-Japan ties beyond security. I discussed my book’s focus on gerontocracy and the struggle to get young people involved in politics—key challenges for both countries. Thanks to everyone who joined!

 

Postdoctoral Associates Lecture Series: Alexandra Mathieu

On February 26, I was delighted to chair a talk featuring our Japan Foundation Postdoctoral Associate Alexandra Mathieu. She shared her fascinating work on how personal biases and international status concerns shape public preferences in Japan.

 

Minority Governments Revisited

Kaare Strøm (UCSD) and I have a new book chapter out on Minority Governments Revisited! The chapter is part of Patrick Dumont, Bernard Grofman, Torbjörn Bergman, and Tom Louwerse, eds. New Developments in the Study of Coalition Governments. Studies in Public Choice, vol 9. Springer, Cham.

Abstract

Despite decades of scholarship on coalition bargaining in parliamentary democracies, minority governments remain a puzzle. From the 1970s on, cross-national empirical scholarship has shown minority governments to be surprisingly common across parliamentary democracies. Even though scholarship that sought to explain identify the conditions that favored the formation minority governments developed, our knowledge still remains somewhat parochial. In this chapter we ask whether our existing understanding of minority governments can be generalized to more recent decades and to recent democracies of Central and Eastern Europe. We review existing explanations of the incidence and performance of minority governments and ask whether they still apply in this broader context. We find that minority governments tend to form under disproportional bargaining power, a larger number of parties in parliament, when the vote of investiture is not required, and when even opposition parties can expect to have policy impact. Next, we inspect the governance mechanisms that permit minority governments to retain power. Finally, our analysis of their performance shows that although less durable than other cabinet types, minority governments are remarkably successful at the polls. This comprehensive analysis and our robust findings across regions and periods contribute to the “normalization” of minority governments.

 

Fletcher School: What's Next for Asia?

I was delighted to speak on a panel with Aram Hur for the newly launched Fletcher Asia Forum’s first event at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. We shared insights from our research and discussed long-standing issues in East Asia that shape its democratic and diplomatic future with the United States.