The twelfth session of the Japanese Politics Online Seminar Series (JPOSS) took place on April 1, 2021. Daniel M. Smith (Harvard University) chaired the seminar and moderated the question and answer session.
Taishi Muraoka (Washington University in St. Louis) presented his pre-analysis plan, “How Do Voters Perceive Female Politicians’ Abilities to Distribute Pork?” In his presentation, Muraoka examined whether voters believe that female politicians are more or less competent in the domain of distributive (or pork-barrel) politics. To answer this question, Muraoka outlined research design to shed light on this question using original
original survey experiments that measure voters’ perceptions about female
politicians’ abilities in two policy areas related to “pork”: agricultural subsidies and infrastructure investment. With the aim of theorizing the linkage between political science literatures on gender and distributive politics, Muroaka discussed his plan to test the proposition that voters believe that female politicians are less competent at distributive politics using samples of adults from two OECD countries with the lowest levels of gender representation where distributive politics plays an important role: Hungary and Japan.
Discussant comments were offered by Nichole M. Bauer (Louisiana State University), Alexander Coppock (Yale University). The discussion raised interesting questions about the theoretical linkages between public attitudes toward gender and distributive politics, Japanese electoral politics, and the pros and cons of using different kinds of experimental research methods. The discussants and the audience also offered many constructive suggestions pertaining to research methods and possible future directions of the research.
This event attracted close to forty participants and produced an engaging Q&A session. The organizers would like to thank the presenters, discussants, and participants, as well as the staff at the Harvard Program on U.S.-Japan Relations, who provided administrative support. We look forward to seeing you at the next session of JPOSS: https://jposs.org/