We are pleased to announce the details of the 16th Yamakawa Kenjiro Lecture Series.
The speaker is Isabela Mares, Arnold Wolfers Professor of Political Science at Yale University.

The two talks will discuss the methodological and empirical aspects of electoral clientelism based on her new book (with Lauren E. Young), Conditionality and Coercion (Oxford University Press, 2019).The talks are open to the public


1. First talk: "How to study electoral irregularities: new advances in theory and measurement"

DATE: March 9th (Mon); 15:30 to 18:00.
VENUE; Collaboration Room 3 at Building 18, University of Tokyo, Komaba Campus

<https://www.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/eng_site/info/about/visitors/maps-directions/campusmap.html>

OUTLINE: In elections around the world, large numbers of voters are influenced by promises or threats that are contingent on how they vote. Recently, the political science literature has made considerable progress in disaggregating electoral clientelism along two dimensions: first, in recognizing the diversity of actors mediating between candidates and voters and, second, in conceptualizing and disaggregating clientelism based on positive and negative inducements of different forms. In this talk, I report the results of several studies I conducted that use non-obtrusive survey techniques, such as list-experiments, to measure the presence of clientelistic strategies. I also show how a variety of other survey experiments can be used to measure voters' evaluation of candidates that use various forms of clientelism and help us understand why voters do not always sanction candidates that use illicit strategies.


2. Second Talk: "Democratization after Democratization: How European countries ended electoral corruption"

DATE; March 10th (Tue): 17:30 to 19:30
VENUE; Conference Room 1, ISS Building, University of Tokyo, Hongo Campus
<https://www.iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp/guide/index.html>

OUTLINE: In many European countries, elections during the period following the adoption of universal suffrage displayed remarkably high levels of vote-buying, intimidation and fraud. As voters' electoral autonomy was insufficiently protected, electoral rights were only hollow promises, In this talk, I examine the democratization of electoral practices in several European countries during the 19th century. I study the introduction of multiple electoral reforms which include legislation that sought to limit vote-buying, lower the ability of candidates to politicize state resources, improve voting technology and protect voter autonomy as well as reforms that limited fraud. Taking advantage of newly digitized historical data, I examine the conditions under which electoral majorities supporting such reforms came about and the relative importance of economic and political changes for the formation of these coalitions favoring electoral change. I conclude by discussing the implications of these successful episodes of democratization of electoral practices for recent democracies today.

This talk is based on Chapter 2 of her recent book (with Lauren Young) Conditionality and Coercion

Please contact <hiwatari@iss.u-tokyo> for further information or queries.


SPEAKER: Isabela Mares
Arnold Wolfers Professor of Political Science
<https://politicalscience.yale.edu/people/isabela-mares>

Isabela Mares is Professor of Political Science at Yale University. Isabela Mares has written extensively on a range of topics in comparative politics and political economy, including democratization, clientelism and corruption, taxation and fiscal capacity development, social policy reforms in both developed and developing countries. She is the author of The Politics of Social Risk: Business and Welfare State Development (New York: Cambridge University Press), Taxation, Wage Bargaining and Unemployment (New York: Cambridge University Press); From Open Secrets to Secret Voting: The adoption of electoral reforms protecting voter autonomy (New York: Cambridge University Press) and Conditionality and Coercion: Electoral clientelism in Eastern Europe, co-authored with Lauren Young (forthcoming, Oxford University Press). She is currently completing a book entitled Democratization after Democratization, which examines the adoption of electoral reforms limiting electoral irregularities in the Western World.

Isabela Mares has received a PhD degree in political science from Harvard University. Prior to coming to Yale, Isabela Mares has been on the faculty of Stanford and Columbia University, and has taught at Sciences Po Paris and the Central European University in Budapest. She has held visiting appointments at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton and the Russell Sage Foundation.

At Yale, Isabela Mares is teaching courses in political economy, welfare state development, democratization and democratic erosion and an interdisciplinary graduate course on Micro-historical Analysis in Comparative Research.