Japan is commonly regarded as a country that is closed against migrants. It does not allow their entries in a large size, granting restricted rights. As an attempt to understand this tendency, this research claims that Japan’s citizenship law, jus sanguinis (by ancestry) principle, sets a fundamental frame for its migration policymaking. To test this claim, it examines how the citizenship law influences attitudes of the general public as well as those of politicians. Specifically, Japan under a strong emphasis on blood ties is more likely to impose a restrictive migration policy, because (1) the general public tends to reveal a greater distance toward migrants (societal nature); and (2) migrant groups are excluded from electorate, and thus, politicians are less inclined to impose generous policies for them (electoral nature).  In order to demonstrate these mechanisms, this research traces Japanese public attitude and political incentives, which have governed its migration policy until today.

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This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by the Munro Lectureship Fund and The Europe Center.

James E. Alt is the Frank G. Thomson Professor of Government. His current interests are in comparative political economy; the interaction of voters, political parties, budget and other political institutions, financial markets, and fiscal policies in industrial democracies. His recent research analyzes institutional transparency, accountability and corruption, and fiscal policy outcomes in OECD countries and US states. He is author, co-author, or editor of The Politics of Economic Decline (Cambridge University Press, 1979, reissued 2009), Political Economics (University of California Press, 1983), Cabinet Studies (Macmillan, 1975), Advances in Quantitative Methods (Elsevier, 1980), Perspectives on Positive Political Economy (Cambridge University Press, 1990), Competition and Cooperation (Russell Sage, 1999) and Positive Changes in Political Science (Michigan, 2007). He has published numerous articles in scholarly journals, including "Partisan Dealignment in Britain 1964-1974" in the British Journal of Political Science, "Political Parties, World Demand, and Unemployment" in the American Political Science Review, "Divided Government, Fiscal Institutions, and Deficits: Evidence from the States," in the American Political Science Review, "Fiscal Policy Outcomes and Electoral Accountability in American States," in the American Political Science Review, and “Disentangling Accountability and Competence in Elections: Evidence from U.S. Term Limits,” in the Journal of Politics. He is the founding director of the Center for Basic Research in the Social Sciences, now the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. He is or has been a member of the editorial boards of the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Political Studies, and other journals, and has been a member of the Political Science Panel of the National Science Foundation. He was a Guggenheim Fellow 1997-98 and a Senior Research Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford from 2007-2011. Alt is an International Fellow of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, London, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004.

This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by the Munro Lectureship Fund and The Europe Center.

Sponsored by: Stanford University Libraries, Hoover Institution,

Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law

Even before the 2016 election campaign, political polarization and filter bubbles in social media and revelations of foreign meddling, Francis Fukuyama raised his concerns about the decline and decay of democracy in the U.S. and elsewhere. Today we live in a new environment where Americans and others get up to two-thirds of their news — real and otherwise — on Facebook, where Twitter bots magnify propaganda, and where foreigners posing as Americans even organize demonstrations and counter-demonstrations on social media. Yet even without these technological developments, from Eastern Europe to the U.S., we observe the re-emergence of demons we thought we left behind after World War II: the rise of blood and soil nationalism, the decline in rule of law and the institutions that uphold democratic governance: parliaments, courts, a free and unfettered press. We believed that through NATO, the WTO, and the EU democracy and peace would be firmly grounded. What happens when these international organizations begin to unravel? Where are we headed? What have we learned so we can avoid the disasters of the 1930s? What are the fundamental institutional reforms we need to make? How do we accommodate the new superpower China, with its alternative model of governance, not only domestically, but increasingly in the international sphere? These questions will be discussed in a conversation by Toomas Hendrik Ilves and Francis Fukuyama.

Speakers:

Toomas Hendrik Ilves is the former President of Estonia (2006–2016). He has previously also served as Estonian foreign minister, member of European Parliament, and the ambassador of Estonia in Washington. In 2017 Ilves joined Stanford University as a Bernard and Susan Liautaud Visiting Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford’s hub for researchers tackling some of the world’s most pressing security and international cooperation problems. He is currently Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Hoover Institution.

Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Mosbacher Director of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He is also a professor by courtesy in the Department of Political Science. Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues relating to questions concerning democratization and international political economy. His book, The End of History and the Last Man, was published by Free Press in 1992 and has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His most recent book is Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy.

While much of the existing literature examines vote buying in the context of party systems, including both competitive and hegemonic party systems, this talk, based on a study coauthored by Professor Susan Whiting, addresses vote buying in a context in which no political party effectively structures electoral competition—village elections in China. This study argues that the lure of non-competitive rents explains variation over time and space in the phenomenon of vote buying. It tests this hypothesis, derived from an in-depth case study, in a separate sample of 1200 households in 62 villages in five provinces, using villagers’ reports of vote buying in elections and survey data on land takings as an indicator of available rents. While the literature views the introduction of elections as increasing accountability of village leaders to voters, vote buying likely undermines accountability. This study suggests that the regime has tolerated vote buying as a means of identifying and coopting influential economic elites in rural communities.

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China has undergone historic economic, social and cultural transformations since its Opening and Reform. Leading scholars explore expanding repertoires of control that this authoritarian regime – both central and local – are using to manage social fissures, dislocation and demands. What new strategies of governance has the Chinese state devised to manage its increasingly fractious and dynamic society? What novel mechanisms has the state innovated to pre-empt, control and de-escalate contention? China Program’s 2018 Winter Colloquia Series highlights cutting-edge research on contemporary means that various levels of the Chinese state are deploying to manage both current and potential discontent from below.

Abstract:

Fukuyama (1989) was right: a centuries-old argument about government should be over. Liberal democracy is the best regime known to us. It isn’t close: for life’s important aspects, including health, wealth, liberty, and peace, democracy dominates all known alternatives. Empirically, however, the argument is not over. Indeed, there is widespread concern that many citizens (and, sadly, some academics) are less enthusiastic about democracy than the evidence warrants. I argue that when we search for solutions to complex problems (e.g., the design of governments) we often make a serious error in our mental representation of the choice problem: instead of using the criterion of the best feasible option, we ignore important constraints and look for an alternative that satisfies certain value-standards. When these standards are unrealistic, as they often are, we can become disillusioned with the best possible option. Robert Michels was wrong; Voltaire, and Henny Youngman, were right.

Speaker Bio:

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