Kentaro Fukumoto

Making Outsiders’ Votes Count: Detecting Electoral Fraud Through a Natural Experiment

Weak electoral registration requirements are commonly thought to encourage electoral participation, but may also promote electoral fraud. As one possibility, candidates and their supporters can more easily mobilize voters who do not reside within the district to register there fraudulently and vote for that districts candidates. We statistically detect this classic type of electoral fraud for the first time, by taking advantage of a natural experimental setting in Japanese municipal elections. We argue that whether or not a municipal election was held in April 2003 can be regarded as an “as-if” randomly assigned treatment. A differences-in-differences analysis of municipality–month panel data shows that the increase in the new population just prior to April 2003 is significantly larger in treatment municipalities (with an election) than in control ones (without an election). The estimated effects are decisive enough to change the electoral results when the election is competitive. We argue that our approach—“election timing as treatment”—can be applied to investigate not only this type of electoral fraud but also electoral connections in other countries.

What Happens Depends on When It Happens: Copula-Based Ordered Event History Analysis of Civil War Duration and Outcome

Scholars are interested in not just what event happens but also when the event happens. If there is dependence among events or dependence between time and events, however, the currently common methods (e.g., competing risks approaches) produce biased estimates. To deal with these problems, this article proposes a new method of copula-based ordered event history analysis (COEHA). A merit of working with copulas is that, whatever marginal distributions time and event variables follow (including the Cox model), researchers can derive whatever joint distribution exists between the two. Application of the COEHA model to a dataset from civil wars supports two controversial hypotheses. First, as wars become longer, rebel victory becomes more likely but settlement does not (there is dependence between time and events at both tails). Second, stronger rebels make wars shorter but do not necessarily tend to win, as experts predict but fail to establish (rebels’ strength shortens time but has no effect on which events occur). Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

Legislative Production in Comparative Perspective: Cross-Sectional Study of 42 Countries and Time-Series Analysis of the Japan Case

Legislative scholars have debated what factors (e.g. divided government) account for the number of important laws a legislative body passes per year. This paper presents a monopoly model for explaining legislative production. It assumes that a legislature adjusts its law production so as to maximize its utility. The model predicts that socio-economic and political changes increase the marginal benefit of law production, whereas low negotiation costs and ample legislative resources decrease the marginal cost of law production. The model is tested in two ways. The first approach compares the legislatures of 42 developed and developing countries. The second analyzes Japanese lawmaking from 1949 to 1990, using an appropriate method for event count time series data. Both empirical investigations support the models predictions for legislative production.

Share the Name, Share the Vote: A Natural Experiment of Name Recognition

Do candidates garner more votes simply because their names are better recognized? To answer this question, we use elections to the Japanese House of Councillors as a natural experiment. Members are elected in national and local-level districts. To isolate the effect of name recognition on vote choice, we compare the vote shares of national district candidates in high-name-recognition prefectures—which we define as prefectures in which a national candidate shares the same surname as a local district candidate—and the other low-name-recognition prefectures. Our research design addresses internal and external validity problems from which previous studies suffer. We find that national candidates obtain 69% larger vote shares in high- as opposed to low-name-recognition prefectures. This result holds when controlling for idiosyncratic characteristics of national candidates and prefecture-specific surname popularity.

Identifying the Effect of Mobilization on Voter Turnout through a Natural Experiment

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 municipal election is as-if randomly assigned. The results show that almost concurrently held municipal elections boost these municipalities’ voter turnout in prefectural elections by one to two percentage points. We argue that some unique settings in Japan allow us not only to mitigate omitted variable bias but also to attribute the estimated effect only to mobilization, rather than the effects of cost sharing and psychological stimulus.

Measuring Judicial Independence Reconsidered: Survival Analysis, Matching, and Average Treatment Effects

This article reconsiders how to judge judicial independence by using the Japanese judicature, one of the allegedly-most dependent judiciary branches. In their influential work, Ramseyer and Rasmusen (2003) argue that judges who once belonged to a leftist group take longer to reach a ‘moderately prestigious status’ under the long-term conservative rule of Japan. Their method does not, however, deal appropriately with the possibility of judges not reaching this position because the judge dies, retires early, or is still at the early stage of her career. Ramseyer and Rasmusen also mistakenly assume that all judges will eventually obtain this position. This article develops a survival analysis model of judicial careers and attempts to solve the problems of censoring, left truncation, and split population. We also offer a way to utilize a matching procedure to estimate average treatment effects on censored time-to-event as well as event occurrence. We re-analyze a corrected version of Ramseyer and Rasmusens data using their and our methods. One of the most important findings is that, contrary to what Ramseyer and Rasmusen argue, leftist judges are not discriminated against in terms of the timing of promotion.