APSA blogging

I imagine that some of my readers may be in Boston for this year's APSA annual meeting.

I'm planning on attending, and will be at a number of Asia-related panels (and possibly blog about what I hear).

If you'll be at APSA, feel free to drop me a line (observingjapan@gmail.com).

UPDATE: Blogging will depend on whether panels are on- or off-record. Can anyone confirm one way or the other?

Voters are a foreign country

At The Monkey Cage, a group blog authored by four political science professors at George Washington University, John Sides dissects surveys that attempt to illustrate just how much (or little) Americans know about politics.

He points to a study that shows that respondents who were given more time to respond and/or a financial reward for correct answers performed better than a control group of respondents who had only a minute to respond (and no reward).

The post is worth a look, but reading it brought to mind a bigger dilemma that I face a political analyst and political scientist-to-be.

I find it exceedingly difficult to understand the thinking of the "average" voter not just in Japan, but in my own country. As someone whose days are spent following the news and reading and writing commentary, I find it impossible to imagine what facts, ideas, and prejudices shape voter decisions, and as this study shows, the US news media — which often reports on surveys illustrating the ignorance of the American people and I suspect skews its political coverage accordingly — probably doesn't have any better idea about what voters think.

That said, as Professor Sides notes, "If the average respondent in every group answered about 5 or 6 out of 14 questions, is this 'sweeping generalization' really that inaccurate? Is most of the variance in knowledge really explained by, well, knowledge, rather than by a lack of effort or ability to recall the answers correctly?"

I don't doubt that the average voter, who maybe glances at the headlines of the daily newspaper a few times a week and watches a few minutes of evening news a week, has a limited knowledge of political trivia, but what does that mean for voting behavior? Do ignorant voters equal bad voters?

Carl Schmitt on the US-Japan alliance

Well, not exactly, but I found this passage in "The Concept of The Political" interesting in light of Japan's schizophrenic relationship with the US.

...It would be a mistake to believe that a nation could eliminate the distinction of friend and enemy by declaring its friendship for the entire world or by voluntarily disarming itself. The world will not thereby become depoliticalized, and it will not be transplanted into a condition of pure morality, pure justice, or pure economics. If a people is afraid of the trials and risks implied by existing in the sphere of politics, then another people will appear which will assume these trials by protecting it against foreign enemies and thereby taking over political rule. The protector then decides who the enemy is by virtue of the eternal relation of protection and obedience.

Discuss.

Constructing modern Japan

Every social scientist must struggle with the question of human agency. Are human societies the product of grand social forces or are they the product of the decisions of individuals — Carlyle's heroes?

The question is particularly important for Japan, which was pushed on to a drastically different path in the late nineteenth century when confronted with the encroachment of imperial powers into Asia. But was Japan's modernization the result of powerful impersonal forces — the international system, economics, Japanese culture — or was it driven by the decisions of the elites who forged the new system?

This is the swamp into which MIT's Richard Samuels waded in Machiavelli's Children: Leaders and Their Legacies in Italy and Japan. Samuels, in essence, "brings the individual back in" to a discussion of the winding roads followed by late-developing Japan and Italy during the 150 years of their existence as modern states. And he succeeds admirably — in the process explaining in rich detail how Prime Ministers Yoshida and Kishi, building upon the prewar past, designed, for better or worse, the Japan we see today (the Japan that their heirs are struggling to bring into the twenty-first century).

As Samuels suggests in his introduction, the comparative analysis of Japan and Italy strikes many as counterintuitive, perhaps because Italy needed Fascists to make the trains run on time. But beyond the superficial dissimilarities — including the widespread stereotype that Italy has dynamic leaders and poor followers, while Japan has faceless leaders and obedient followers — he finds that despite facing similar conditions, constraints, and opportunities as Gerschenkronian late developers, each made drastically different decisions about governance of the economy and society, liberalism, foreign relations, and, in the postwar period, how to rebuild their states and reconstitute their political systems under the American aegis.

There is far too much in Machiavelli's Children to do it justice in this space, and, as such, this is my latest book recommendation. (NB: I will henceforth give book recommendations on a monthly basis, or else whenever I feel like it; recommending one every week was too grueling.)