Yusaku HoriuchiDartmouth College · Department of Government
Yusaku Horiuchi
Doctor of Philosophy
Professor of Government and Mitsui Professor of Japanese Studies
About
124
Publications
23,321
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
2,179
Citations
Introduction
My research focuses on applying experimental designs and statistical methods to a wide range of empirical questions in political science. Substantive research interests include Japanese politics, foreign public opinion, diversity (race/ethnicity, gender, immigration), electoral politics, and political methodology.
Skills and Expertise
Additional affiliations
July 2012 - present
July 2004 - June 2012
July 2001 - June 2003
Education
September 1995 - June 2021
September 1993 - May 1995
April 1987 - March 1991
Publications
Publications (124)
The war in Ukraine has manifested the critical importance of the American alliance network and the swift and effective deployment of necessary military assets. But do citizens of the U.S. allies support the deployment of such advanced, thus controversial, military assets in their countries? To examine this question, we administered two conjoint exp...
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all domains of human life, including the economic and social fabric of societies. One of the central strategies for managing public health throughout the pandemic has been through persuasive messaging and collective behaviour change. To help scholars better understand the social and moral psychology behind public...
The “rally 'round the flag” effect—a short-term boost in a political leader’s popularity during an interstate political dispute—was first proposed by Mueller (1970) more than half a century ago. However, there is no scholarly consensus on its empirical validity and the circumstances under which the effect becomes most prominent. In this paper, base...
Previous studies have shown that people oppose refugee resettlement more strongly after being exposed to frames that depict refugees as threatening. However, all people may not perceive such threats the same way. Based on contact theory, we hypothesize that the treatment effects of threatening frames on people’s opposition to refugee resettlement a...
Although many countries engage in public diplomacy, we know relatively little about the conditions under which their efforts create foreign support for their desired policy outcomes. Drawing on the psychological theory of "insincerity aversion," we argue that the positive effects of public diplomacy on foreign public opinion are attenuated and pote...
Scholars and practitioners often argue that the United States’ identity as a democracy contributes to the effectiveness and endurance of U.S. military alliances. One way to test this claim is to ask: what would happen if citizens of allied countries came to perceive U.S. democracy as severely flawed or diminished? In the context of now well-documen...
Unlabelled:
Although many countries engage in public diplomacy, we know relatively little about the conditions under which their efforts create foreign support for their desired policy outcomes. Drawing on the psychological theory of "insincerity aversion," we argue that the positive effects of public diplomacy on foreign public opinion are attenu...
Scholars and practitioners often argue that the United States’ identity as a democracy contributes to the effectiveness and endurance of US military alliances. One way to test this claim is to ask: what would happen if citizens of allied countries came to perceive US democracy as severely flawed or diminished? In the context of now well-documented...
A growing number of news articles and politicians’ statements treat refugees as potential terrorists. However, existing research has yet to thoroughly examine how threatening information about refugees affects natives’ attitudes toward refugee resettlement. To address this issue, we conducted a survey experiment in Japan, where the number of refuge...
To what extent has the Ukrainian refugee crisis altered citizens' attitudes toward refugee resettlement? Leveraging data from original repeated surveys of citizens in the ten countries with the largest refugee resettlement programs, we examine changes in public opinion before and after the crisis. Our findings reveal a substantial increase in suppo...
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all domains of human life, including the economic and social fabric of societies. One of the central strategies for managing public health throughout the pandemic has been through persuasive messaging and collective behavior change. To help scholars better understand the social and moral psychology behind public h...
In a recently published article, Allen et al. (Outside the wire: U.S. military deployments and public opinion in host states’, American Political Science Review, 114(2), 326–341; 2020) argue that US military deployments nurture favorable attitudes toward the United States among foreign citizens. Their claim is based on social contact and economic c...
Changing collective behaviour and supporting non-pharmaceutical interventions is an important component in mitigating virus transmission during a pandemic. In a large international collaboration (Study 1, N = 49,968 across 67 countries), we investigated self-reported factors associated with public health behaviours (e.g., spatial distancing and str...
The number of multiracial candidates seeking office is growing in an increasingly diverse America. This raises questions about how the media frame candidates with potentially complex racial backgrounds and how voters respond to these frames. We investigate the impact of media frames that emphasize race and gender attributes using survey experiments...
The "rally 'round the flag" effect---a short-term boost in a political leader's popularity during an interstate political dispute---was first proposed by Mueller (1970) more than half a century ago. However, there is no scholarly consensus on its empirical validity and the circumstances under which the effect becomes most prominent. In this paper,...
While most existing research attributes contemporary Japanese emigration to the pursuit of a better lifestyle, recent qualitative studies point out that concern about country risks is a significant driver . We explore Japan’s brain-drain potential and factors shaping Japanese skilled workers’ interest in emigrating to other countries based on our o...
How can we elicit honest responses in surveys? Conjoint analysis has become a popular tool to address social desirability bias (SDB), or systematic survey misreporting on sensitive topics. However, there has been no direct evidence showing its suitability for this purpose. We propose a novel experimental design to identify conjoint analysis’s abili...
Although many governments invest significant resources in public-diplomacy campaigns, there is little well-identified evidence of these efforts’ effectiveness. We examine the effects of a major type of public diplomacy: high-level visits by national leaders to other countries. We combine a dataset of the international travels of 15 leaders from 9 c...
Although reaching the voting age and getting enrolled in the voters’ list is an essential first step in the electoral process, existing studies have rarely investigated its effects on citizens’ socio-political experiences and civic attitudes. To fill this gap, we leverage a natural experiment in Japan, where citizens who turn eighteen years old and...
To what extent does exposure to immigration condition the types of immigrants citizens are willing to admit? Extending the conjoint approach adopted by Hainmueller and Hopkins (Am J Pol Sci 59(3):529–548, 2015), this study investigates whether the admission preferences of French natives vary based on personal exposure to immigration, as proxied by...
The recent surge in protectionist sentiment in countries around the world has rekindled the long-standing debate over the determinants of citizens’ trade policy preferences. We examine the influence of two understudied but increasingly relevant factors – misinformation and economic threat – on support for international trade in the United States. W...
Although pre-electoral political manipulation of the budget — the political budget cycle (PBC) — has been long investigated by scholars, empirical findings are mixed at best. This is partly because of the non-random nature of election timing. There also exist ongoing debates over how the budget is manipulated for electoral purposes. We address thes...
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is a devastating global health crisis. Without a vaccine or effective medication, the best hope for mitigating virus transmission is collective behavior change and support for public health interventions (e.g., physical distancing, physical hygiene, and endorsement of health policies). In a large-scale international co...
The U.S. President Donald Trump has frequently made foreign countries central to his political messages, often conveying animosity. But do foreign citizens react more to the speaker of these messages—Trump himself—or their content? More generally, when people are exposed to messages sent from foreign countries, are their attitudes influenced by inf...
In a recently published article, Allen et. a. (2020) argue that U.S. military deployments nurture favorable attitudes toward the U.S. among foreign citizens. Their claim is based on social contact and economic compensation theories, applied to a large-scale cross-national survey project funded by the U.S. government. However, their analysis disrega...
When individuals' racial attitudes are associated with their judgments related to race---for example, when people with more negative attitudes toward Blacks are less likely to vote for a Black political candidate---existing studies routinely interpret it as evidence of prejudice against minorities. But theoretically, such associations can represent...
The gender publication gap puts women at a disadvantage for tenure and promotion, which contributes to the discipline’s leaky pipeline. Several studies published in PS find no evidence of gender bias in the review process and instead suggest that submission pools are distorted by gender. To make a contribution to this important debate, we fielded a...
In recent years, concerns about misinformation in the media have skyrocketed. President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that various news outlets are disseminating ‘fake news’ for political purposes. But when the information contained in mainstream media news reports provides no clear clues about its truth value or any indication of a partisan...
Although the value of diversity—in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status—to the U.S. military has been subject to debate, preferences for diversity at educational institutions for the military officers are rarely examined systematically. To address this, we investigate whether midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy favor prioriti...
What explains the scarcity of women and under-represented minorities among university faculty relative to their share of Ph.D. recipients? Among many potential explanations, we focus on the “demand” side of faculty diversity. Using fully randomized conjoint analysis, we explore patterns of support for, and resistance to, the hiring of faculty candi...
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...
Representative democracy entails the aggregation of multiple policy issues by parties into competing bundles of policies, or “manifestos,” which are then evaluated holistically by voters in elections. This aggregation process obscures the multidimensional policy preferences underlying a voter’s single choice of party or candidate. We address this p...
Japan's remarkable postwar growth spurt in the 1960s would not have been possible without Japan's alliance with the United States. Policy makers, political scientists, economists, historians, and journalists on both sides of the Pacific have made this claim, but no study has yet tested it with modern statistical methods. In this article, we compare...
Existing studies—most importantly, Gomez, Hansford, and Krause—provide empirical support for an idea often embraced by popular media: The vote share of the Republican Party (as the percentage of total votes) increases when it rains, because the magnitude of decrease in turnout is larger among Democratic vis-à-vis Republican supporters. Considering...
One week after President Donald Trump signed a controversial executive order to reduce the influx of refugees to the United States, we conducted a survey experiment to understand American citizens’ attitudes toward refugee resettlement. Specifically, we evaluated whether citizens consider the geographic context of the resettlement program (that is,...
What difference does it make if the state makes people vote? The question is central to normative debates about the rights and duties of citizens in a democracy, and to contemporary policy debates in a number of Latin American countries over what actions states should take to encourage electoral participation. Focusing on a rare case of abolishing...
Although numerous get-out-the-vote field experiments have identified the effects of particular mobilization tactics (e.g., canvassing, phone calls, direct mails) on voter turnout, we do not yet have a full understanding of the causal effect of overall mobilization. We study this by leveraging a natural experiment in Japan, in which the timing of a...
While the existing literature has identified a sizable incumbency advantage in single-member district (SMD) races in developed democracies, we argue that some political and institutional contexts of Japan’s Lower House elections would undermine the incumbency advantage. Our regression discontinuity (RD) analysis indeed shows little advantage, and f...
Why do some politicians acquire more posts and achieve faster career progression, while others do not? We argue that it is the opportunity for members of parliament (MPs) to develop and demonstrate their effectiveness as lawmakers and politicians that helps them develop political careers. By leveraging a natural experiment in the United Kingdom whe...
The personal attributes of politicians are often important in determining the outcomes of elections, yet few studies have rigorously investigated which particular personal attributes (among many) are most relevant in shaping voters' preferences for politicians. We investigate this question with a conjoint survey experiment in Japan. In contrast to...
Randomized ballot order of electoral candidates prevents unfair advantages for candidates with favorable positions on a ballot, but it also places additional cognitive strain on voters who need to search for their preferred candidates without clues. This strain could increase voters' probability of making errors. Using more than 68,000 polling-plac...
In this article we examine the role of local politicians in affecting national-level election outcomes by focusing on the drastic municipal mergers in Japan that took place in the early 2000s. Specifically, we argue that the political party that relies most extensively on local politicians' efforts for electoral mobilization and monitoring will suf...
Representative democracy entails the aggregation of multiple policy issues by political parties into competing bundles of policies (manifestos), which are then evaluated holistically by voters in elections. This process makes it difficult to understand the multidimensional policy preferences underlying a voter's single choice (vote for a particular...
While the existing literature has identified a sizable incumbency advantage in single-member district (SMD) races in developed democracies, we argue that some political and institutional contexts of Japan's Lower House elections would undermine the incumbency advantage. Our regression discontinuity (RD) analysis indeed shows little advantage, and f...
The two-party vote share of the Republican Party in U.S. elections tends to increase when it rains, but its mechanism is not fully understood. Existing studies focus on the costs of participation and argue that bad weather hurts the Democratic Party disproportionately because cost-sensitive marginal voters tend to be supporters of the Democratic Pa...
What would Israel’s economy have looked like without the 2000 Palestinian Intifada? This article examines this counterfactual question by statistically comparing the economic growth trajectories of Israel and a “synthetic” Israel, which is constructed by applying a method proposed by Abadie and Gardeazabal (2003) and Abadie, Diamond and Hainmueller...
What difference does it make if more, or fewer, people vote? What difference would it make if the state makes people vote? These questions are central both to normative debates about the rights and duties of citizens in a democracy and to contemporary policy debates in a variety of countries over what actions states should take to encourage elector...
Does higher (lower) voter turnout produce more votes for parties on the left (right)? Over the course of the past seven decades, both academics and the media have studied this question at length. In this paper, however, we argue that whether voter turnout has a causal effect on the outcome of an election is a "fundamentally unidentified question" (...
Social scientists have long investigated the roles of citizens’ civic attitudes and associational life in democracies. Yet, it remains to be fully elucidated whether their attitudes and activities not only influence but also are influenced by the political process in democracies. To address this question, we estimate the socio-attitudinal impacts o...
Does foreign aid extended by one country improve that country’s image among populations of recipient countries? Using a multinational survey, we show that a United States aid program targeted to address HIV and AIDS substantially improves perceptions of the U.S. Our identification strategy for causal inference is to use instrumental variables measu...
In this paper, using our original data on party leadership succession in twenty-three parliamentary democracies, we investigate the determinants of a party leader’s survival rate: how long he/she remains in office. Unlike previous studies, which focus on institutional settings of leadership selection or on situational (political, economic, and inte...
When does a political party decide to hold a primary election to choose a candidate for the next election, and when does an incumbent decide to announce his/her political retirement? Furthermore, if they make decisions interactively, how do their decisions affect the quality – 'valence' - of the candidate who ends up running for the party? In this...
Does “soft power” matter in international relations? Specifically, when the U.S. seeks cooperation from countries around the world, do the views of their publics about U.S. foreign policy affect the actual foreign policy behavior of these countries? We examine this question using multinational surveys covering 58 countries, combined with informatio...
Previous studies examining whether the faces of candidates affect election outcomes commonly measure study participants’ subjective judgment of various characteristics of candidates, which participants infer based solely on the photographic images of candidates. We, instead, develop a smile index of such images objectively with automated face recog...
Samuels and Snyder (BJPS, 2001) presented the index of malapportionment (i.e., the discrepancy between seat shares and population shares by electoral districts) in national legislatures for seventy eight countries. This short research note uses their index and the Gini index, a commonly used measure of income inequality, and shows that democracies...
Weak electoral registration requirements are commonly thought to encourage electoral participation, but may also promote electoral fraud. For one, candidates and their supporters can more easily mobilize voters outside the district to register and vote for the candidates, even though these voters do not reside within the district. We statistically...
We explore in this article an institutional foundation of agricultural protectionism in Japan, a country long recognized as resisting international pressures to open up its rice market. Using our qualitative analysis of postwar politics of agricultural protectionism and a simple formal model, we argue that farmers in Japan have stronger incentives...
Japanese politics is by no means a new subject to research for political scientists. Over many decades, scholars have written numerous books and journal articles in English on Japanese politics. Some are specifically aimed at understanding political and policy processes in Japan, while others use Japan as a case study, often in comparison with othe...