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21
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Introduction
Education
September 2015 - September 2021
September 2013 - September 2015
September 2008 - September 2012
Publications
Publications (21)
Rises in suicide rates following media reports of the deaths by suicide of public figures are a well-documented phenomenon. However, it remains unclear why, or by what exact mechanism, celebrity suicides act to increase suicidal risk in the wider public due to the lack of data showing how the public understands and reacts to the suicide of well-kno...
The implementation of digital contact tracing applications around the world to help reduce the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic represents one of the most ambitious uses of massive-scale citizen data ever attempted. There is major divergence among nations, however, between a “privacy-first” approach which protects citizens’ data at the cost of extre...
Populist attitudes are generally measured in surveys through three necessary and non-compensatory elements of populism, namely anti-elitism, people-centrism, and Manicheanism. Using Comparative Study of Electoral Systems Module 5 (2016–2020) data for 30 countries, we evaluate whether this approach explains voting for populist parties across countri...
The months around the US 2020 presidential election were characterized by polarization, populism, conspiracy theories, and violent acts, far exceeding usual out-party animosity in western democracies. Using an original two-wave panel survey fielded before the election in November 2020 (n = 3111) and after the inauguration in January 2021 (n = 3384)...
The rise in salience of conspiracy theory beliefs has created a new potential space for political entrepreneurs to emerge, but the costs of openly engaging in conspiracy theory rhetoric outweigh the potential rewards for most parties, which instead use "dog whistle" strategies to maintain deniability regarding their views. We present the case of Sa...
Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) continued to slide in public opinion polls in 2023, with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida's approval ratings never recovering from the scandal over the party's association with the controversial Unification Church that was exposed in the previous year. Kishida survived an assassination attempt in April, and...
The assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzō Abe in July had an enormous impact on politics in Japan in 2022, with subsequent recriminations regarding connections between ruling party lawmakers and the controversial Unification Church new religious movement leading to public outcry and forcing Prime Minister Kishida to remove several high‐prof...
Since the use of social media in election campaigns was made legal in 2013, platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have been widely adopted by candidates in Japan’s elections. This chapter examines how social media platforms were used in the 2021 election, looking at which candidates and parties chose to engage most heavily in online campaigning, a...
The year 2021 saw the resignation of Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga after just a year in office, following steep declines in his government's approval ratings due to public dissatisfaction with aspects of his handling of the COVID‐19 pandemic and the Tokyo Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games. His successor, former Minister for Foreign Affairs Fumio...
The widespread adoption of social media platforms has often been implicated in discussions about growing polarisation in many nations, with terms like ‘filter bubble’ being coined to describe the algorithmic balkanisation of information and opinion which occurs around users of these platforms. We propose that social media can also provide a window...
Surveys of the attitudes of voters for populist parties generally measure three non-compensatory factors of populism: anti-elitism, people-centrism, and Manicheanism. Using Comparative Study of Electoral Systems Module 5 data for 23 countries, we evaluate whether this approach explains voting for populist parties across countries in Asia, Europe an...
Surveys of the attitudes of voters for populist parties generally measure three non-compensatory factors of populism: anti-elitism, people-centrism, and Manicheanism. Using Comparative Study of Electoral Systems Module 5 data for 23 countries, we evaluate whether this approach explains voting for populist parties across countries in Asia, Europe an...
While populism has become a major force in many nations in recent decades, the extent to which the phenomenon is found in Japan’s politics is a contested topic on which scholars have asserted positions ranging from claims that it simply does not exist in Japan, to opposing claims that Japan’s most powerful and influential recent prime ministers hav...
The idea that social networks deepen polarisation by creating “filter bubbles” around their users which exclude competing political ideas is one of the most persistent, albeit contentious, criticisms of the role of technology in modern politics. While rising social network usage is an international phenomenon, however, the nature of political polar...
Conspiracy theories have emerged as an important factor in the recent rise of populism in many countries, with belief in a range of conspiracies functioning as both a consequence and an enabler of lack of trust in media and experts (or in science more generally), a justification for the authoritarian tendencies of preferred leaders, and a provider...
Social media data is increasingly used to gain insights into trends in mental health, but prior studies aimed at confirming a link between online expression of suicidal ideation on social media and actual suicide deaths have been inconclusive. Using comprehensive six-year data sets of Twitter posts and suicide deaths in Japan, we examine the diurna...
The rising popularity of social media posts, most notably Twitter posts, as a data source for social science research poses significant problems with regard to access to representative, high-quality data for analysis. Cheap, publicly available data such as that obtained from Twitter's public application programming interfaces is often of low qualit...
Two new opposition parties were formed mere weeks before the 2017 House of Representatives election in Japan, with both parties focusing heavily on social media campaigning and gaining large followings on Twitter ahead of polling day. This paper uses a network analysis and text mining approach on a data set of political tweets sent during the elect...
Investigating populist sentiments and their expression in Japan offers an opportunity to explore the nature of contemporary populism in a liberal democracy whose social and political context is quite different from that of Europe or North America. This paper uses a large data set drawn from Japanese social media (specifically Twitter, the country’s...
This paper investigates the behaviour of Japanese gubernatorial candidates following the removal of restrictions on the use of online services in electoral campaigns. It studies the 12 gubernatorial elections which took place in 2014, and determines that factors in the political environment-most notably the degree of competition-were the most impor...