Suchergebnisse

Amongst the many ways in which Japan confounds sociological theory is that the turnout for municipal elections exceeds that for national elections. Yusaku Horiuchi examines the reasons for this phenomenon, looking closely at the role of institutions & the incentives that attract voters to the polls.

Samuels and Snyder in their recent article in this Journal presented an 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 merges their index with the Gini index, a commonly used measure of income inequality, and explores cross-nationally the relationship between inequality in political representation and inequality in economic conditions.

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 experiments in Japan, a critical U.S. ally in Asia. The results show the Japanese citizens' strong Not-In-My-Backyard (NIMBY) sentiment: They value the U.S.-Japan alliance per se but do not want those advanced arms (specifically, Osprey and F-35 fighter jets) to be deployed in their vicinity, particularly when the U.S. military operates them. Our study contributes to the literature on alliance politics and civil-military relations by emphasizing the importance of paying close attention to local public opposition as a potential source of instability in global military alliances.

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, based on a natural experimental design, we analyze large-scale worldwide surveys of 34,118 responses and causally identify the effects of 46 militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) on the approval ratings of political leaders in 27 countries. We find that MIDs, on average, decrease public support for national leaders. However, the public backlash could be attenuated depending on theoretically relevant contexts. Our finding implies that political leaders cannot rely on MIDs for public support increases, as they are generally penalized for such decisions.

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 are conditional on their contact experience with foreign-national residents. The results of our pre-registered experiment in Japan indicate that exposure to threatening information does not change attitudes toward refugee resettlement among those living in municipalities where the number of foreign-national residents is rapidly increasing. Combined with the analyses of other subjective measures of contact with foreigners, some suggestive patterns emerge that natives with conscious and positive interactions with outgroup members may be unaffected by anti-refugee rhetoric and threatening frames.

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 refugees accepted each year is extremely small, despite the rapid increase in news about refugees. Our results show that opposition to refugee resettlement is associated with its proximity. Specifically, we find two types of NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) attitudes – within-country and between-country NIMBY-ism – toward refugee resettlement among Japanese people. Additionally, respondents become more strongly opposed to refugee resettlement when exposed to threatening frames that depict refugees as harmful, regardless of the proximity to threats and potential resettlement. These findings add nuance to the scholarly literature on threat perceptions and public attitudes in intergroup relations. First, our findings suggest that NIMBY attitudes toward refugee resettlement (shown in Ferwerda, Flynn & Horiuchi, 2017) are not a US-only phenomenon. Second, we provide empirical evidence to support the theory that subjectively perceived threats affect people's hostility toward out-group members, even in the absence of actual threats. Finally, we contribute to the recent debate on the effects of proximity to threats. Our results support the argument that the psychological effects of terrorism on negative attitudes toward immigrants and refugees are more pronounced in homogeneous societies, irrespective of proximity to the threat.