Jung Kim
Email:
Academic Year:
2004-05
Direction:
From Yale
Exchange Partners:
University of Tokyo
Research Interest:
The Transformation of Political Parties In Japan After Electroal Reform
Mr. Kim will explore whether or not electoral reform transforms clientelist parties into programmatic parties in Japan. His research aims to explain why changes in Japan s electoral rules have not transformed Japanese politics in the way scholars expected. By taking the differences in voter preferences across districts as an intervening variable - how rural or how urban are the districts -his research shows that the strategies of parties may not converge on a national "median voter" as standard theories suggest.