Publications

A growing literature finds high returns to firms with legislative connections. Less attention has been paid to returns from bureaucratic connections and to organizations beyond for-profit firms. Using data recording the first post-bureaucracy position occupied by all former civil servants in Japan, I reveal a bifurcated job market for former bureaucrats. High-ranking officials from elite economic ministries are more likely to join for-profit firms, where they generate returns such as increased government loans and positive stock market reactions. Lower-ranking officials are more likely to join nonprofits linked to government ministries, which receive higher-value contracts when former bureaucrats are in leadership roles. These patterns suggest that while firms wish to hire bureaucrats who can deliver tangible benefits, ministries also shape revolving door pathways by directing benefits to ensure long-term career value for civil servants. These findings reframe revolving door dynamics as the result of both firm-driven demand and bureaucratic incentives.

Many are skeptical of the appeal of authoritarian political systems. We argue that global audiences will embrace authoritarian models when they believe that autocracies can meet governance challenges better than democracies. We collect comprehensive data on the external messaging of the Chinese and American governments. We then conduct a randomized experiment in 19 countries across 6 continents exposing global citizens to real messages from the Chinese and American governments' external media arms. We find that exposure to a representative set of Chinese messages strengthens perceptions that the Chinese Communist Party delivers growth, stability, and competent leadership. It also moves the average respondent from slightly preferring the American model to slightly preferring the Chinese model. In head-to-head matchups, messages from the U.S. government are less persuasive. Our findings show how autocracies build global support by selling growth and competence, with important implications for democratic resilience.

The Economist · Center for Strategic and International Studies · National Endowment for Democracy · De Groene Amsterdammer · Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions · The Diplomat (1) · The Diplomat (2) · Het Financieele Dagblad

In the first field experiments to encourage participation in local civic bodies, I examine if outreach can reduce inequalities in who participates in city council meetings. Renter participation in local politics lags that of homeowners, who often participate to oppose housing growth. 19,951 renter households received randomly assigned emails encouraging them to comment at their city council meetings and support housing growth. Opening a message highlighting potential costs of abstention from local politics increased public comments by 1.4 percentage points versus placebo. These effects are substantively large: treatment-induced comments represented 8% of total comments and 46% of pro-housing comments across all targeted meetings. The results suggest that even low-cost outreach strategies can meaningfully increase participation in lesser-known settings like city councils and make these bodies more reflective of the general public. Further, increasing the perception that abstention is costly appears to be an effective motivator of collective action.

Harvard Kennedy School PolicyCast

Quantitative empirical inquiry in international relations often relies on dyadic data. Standard analytic techniques do not account for the fact that dyads are not generally independent of one another. That is, when dyads share a constituent member (e.g., a common country), they may be statistically dependent, or "clustered." Recent work has developed dyadic clustering robust standard errors (DCRSEs) that account for this dependence. Using these DCRSEs, we reanalyzed all empirical articles published in International Organization between January 2014 and January 2020 that feature dyadic data. We find that published standard errors for key explanatory variables are, on average, approximately half as large as DCRSEs, suggesting that dyadic clustering is leading researchers to severely underestimate uncertainty. However, most (67% of) statistically significant findings remain statistically significant when using DCRSEs. We conclude that accounting for dyadic clustering is both important and feasible, and offer software in R and Stata to facilitate use of DCRSEs in future research.

Political instability is commonly thought to discourage investment and reduce economic growth. We challenge this consensus by showing that instability does not systematically depress investment. Using an event study approach, we examine daily returns of national financial indices in every country that experienced an irregular regime change subject to data availability. Returns following resignations are large and positive (+4%), while those following assassinations are negative and smaller in magnitude (-2%). The impact of coups tends to be negative (-2%), but we show that a pro-business coup results in large positive returns (+10%). We also find evidence that authoritarian or anti-business regime changes are more likely to lead to capital flight than democratic or pro-business changes. The immediate impact of political instability on investment is therefore dependent on the type of regime change and its expected impact on future growth.

David P. Baron Award for best article published in Business & Politics in 2024.

How can scholars conduct field research when there is limited access to the field? The paper first identifies how limited and uncertain field access can affect field research and then provides recommendations to address these challenges. We focus on doing field research in Japan both because of our substantive expertise, but we think that problems and solutions we outline should be applicable to a broad range of countries. Our hope is that this paper contributes to the developing literature on conducting research during times of emergency and the larger literature on best practices for field research.

It is well known that regime types affect international conflicts. This article explores political parties as a mechanism through which they do so. Political parties operate in fundamentally different ways in democracies vs. non-democracies, which has consequences for foreign policy. Core supporters of a party in a democracy, if they are hawkish, may be more successful at demanding hawkish behavior from their party representatives than would be their counterparts in an autocracy. The study draws on evidence from paired experiments in democratic Japan and non-democratic China to show that supporters of the ruling party in Japan punish their leaders for discouraging nationalist protests, while ruling party insiders in China are less likely to do so. Under some circumstances, then, non-democratic regimes may be better able to rein in peace-threatening displays of nationalism.

Debate persists on whether voters hold politicians accountable for corruption. Numerous experiments have examined whether informing voters about corrupt acts of politicians decreases their vote share. Meta-analysis demonstrates that corrupt candidates are punished by zero percentage points across field experiments, but approximately 32 points in survey experiments. I argue this discrepancy arises due to methodological differences. Small effects in field experiments may stem partially from weak treatments and noncompliance, and large effects in survey experiments are likely from social desirability bias and the lower and hypothetical nature of costs. Conjoint experiments introduce hypothetical costly trade-offs, but it may be best to interpret results in terms of realistic sets of characteristics rather than marginal effects of particular characteristics. These results suggest that survey experiments may provide point estimates that are not representative of real-world voting behavior. However, field experimental estimates may also not recover the "true" effects due to design decisions and limitations.

Japanese energy policy has attracted renewed attention since the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. However, Japan's energy challenges are nothing new; as a country poor in natural resources, it has long struggled to meet its energy needs. This chapter provides an overview of Japanese energy politics, focusing on three broad topics: Japan's modernization and energy security challenges, the politics of the utilities sector and nuclear energy, and the politics of energy conservation and climate change. In addition, the chapter discusses factors specific to Japan, such as state-business relations in the utilities sector and institutional changes since the 1990s. Japan offers both compelling puzzles as well as important empirical opportunities for theory testing. The chapter concludes by calling for additional research that integrates insights from Japan into broader theoretical and cross-national scholarship, examines Japanese energy policy within an international context, and uses rigorous causal identification strategies to evaluate Japanese energy policy.

Under what we call Abenergynomics, Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo has used energy policy to support the growth objectives of Abenomics, even when the associated policies are publicly unpopular, opposed by utility companies, or harmful to the environment. We show how Abenergynomics has shaped Japanese policy on nuclear power, electricity deregulation, renewable energy, and climate change.

We consider the vulnerability of nuclear power plants to a disaster like the one that occurred at Fukushima Daiichi. Examination of Japanese nuclear plants affected by the earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011 shows that three variables were crucial at the early stages of the crisis: plant elevation, sea wall elevation, and location and status of backup generators. Higher elevations for these variables, or waterproof protection of backup generators, could have mitigated or prevented the disaster. We collected information on these variables, along with historical data on run-up heights, for 89 coastal nuclear power plants in the world. The data shows that Japanese plants were relatively unprotected against potential inundation in international comparison, but there was considerable variation for power plants within and outside of Japan; older power plants and plants owned by the largest utility companies appear to have been particularly unprotected.

The New Yorker