A quick look back at work that got out the door in 2021. The big accomplishment for the year was finally completing my PhD thesis, the final title of which was “Party Control and its Effects on Factions, Media, and Citizens: The Case of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party under the Second Abe Administration” – I’m very glad to have finally finished it and hope to update and adapt a few of the chapters into journal papers this year.

Journal Papers

• “How populist attitude scales fail to capture support for populists in power” (with Sebastian Jungkunz and Airo Hino), in PLoS One.
  (What’s interesting about it: several different scales exist for measuring the extent of populist attitudes among citizens in survey research, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. However, testing the populism questions in the CSES surveys conducted in dozens of different nations reveals a potentially major problem – when the populist party is in power, the surveys no longer effectively measure their supporters’ populist attitudes. We argue that this happens because all of these scales assume that the anti-elite attitudes of populist voters are aimed at politicians – but when a populist is actually in power, the “elite” might instead mean the media, experts, business leaders, or some other group. This can cause a paradoxical situation where the supporters of a populist incumbent don’t actually seem to be populist according to surveys and opinion polls.)
  
  
• 「日本におけるポピュリズムと陰謀論の信念」(“Populism and Conspiracy Theory Beliefs in Japan“), in 日本世論調査協会報「よろん」(Yoron, Journal of the Japanese Association for Public Opinion Research) 127号, pp. 11-21.
  (What’s interesting about it: this article is an update on progress in an ongoing project with Airo Hino, Sebastian Camatarri and Sebastian Jungkunz, in which we are analysing the conspiracy beliefs of Japanese citizens and the impact of those beliefs on their political behaviours and inclinations. This paper showed how conspiracy beliefs among citizens can be broadly divided into “classic” conspiracies (such as secret organisations controlling the world, alien cover-ups, or religious groups secretly controlling society) and “anti-government” conspiracies (such as governments hiding information, covering up their own criminal activity, or secretly testing new drugs and technologies on citizens), and that respondents’ level of belief in such conspiracies and their degree of populist attitudes are both connected to their party preferences in elections.)
  

Book Chapters

• “Populism in Japan” (with Airo Hino and Robert Pekkanen), in The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Politics.
  
  
• “From Filter Bubble to Social Divide: Social Polarisation in Europe and Japan” (with Stefano Camatarri), in Value Politics in Japan and Europe.
  

Editorials / Articles

• “Olympics Chief Mori’s Gaffe Exposes Suga’s Weakness“, Tokyo Review
  
  
• “Suga’s Resignation: Back to the Revolving Door?“, Tokyo Review
  
  
• “The first challenge for Japan’s new Prime Minister is party unity“, Tokyo Review

2020 wasn’t exactly a great year for getting things done, but hey; some things got done nonetheless.

Journal Papers

• “Covariance in diurnal patterns of suicide-related expressions on Twitter and recorded suicide deaths” (with Jeremy Boo and Michiko Ueda), in Social Science & Medicine.
  (What’s interesting about it: there’s a surprising lack of clarity about whether people making suicidal statements on social media is actually connected in any way to suicide deaths – some people think it’s an obvious link, others think talk like that on social media is just casual or attention-seeking. We took a five-year sample of Twitter data and suicide death records and showed that with a small time lag, the hour-by-hour pattern of suicide deaths was indeed correlated to the traffic on Twitter regarding suicidal ideation.)
  
  
• “COVID-19, digital privacy, and the social limits on data-focused public health responses” (with Airo Hino), in International Journal of Information Management.
  (What’s interesting about it: this was a really early attempt to untangle some of the issues surrounding the use of digital tracking and contact tracing tools for managing the COVID-19 pandemic. It touches on a few different issues ranging from privacy concerns (and how being cavalier about those concerns could sink the whole digital side of the pandemic response – which, in the end, it did in many countries) to the path-dependency created by the dominance of tech giants.

Book Chapters

• “Sentiment Analysis and Social Media” (with Luigi Curini), in The Sage Handbook of Research Methods in Political Science and International Relations.

Book Reviews

• 「図書紹介：『内容分析の進め方　ーメディア・メッセージを読み解く』」、日本世論調査協会報「よろん」、126号、52−54. (“Book Review: ‘Analyzing Media Messages: Using Quantitative Content Analysis in Research'”, YORON: Journal of the Japanese Association for Public Opinion Research, Vol. 126, pp.52-54)

Conference Papers / Presentations

• “From Filter Bubble to Social Divide: Social Polarisation in Europe and Japan” (with Stefano Camatarri), APSA General Meeting 2020
  
  
• “Belief in Conspiracy Theories and Socio-Political Identity in Japan” (with Airo Hino, Stefano Camatarri and Sebastian Jungkunz), APSA General Meeting 2020.
  
  
• 「日本におけるポピュリズムと陰謀論の信念」、日本世論調査協会研究大会。(“Populism and Belief in Conspiracy Theories in Japan”, at the Japanese Association for Public Opinion Research (JAPOR) Annual Research Meeting.)

Editorials / Articles

• “Time to Give Japan Credit for its COVID-19 Response” (with Paul Nadeau), Tokyo Review
  
  
• “Abe Shinzo Enters the Polling Danger Zone“, Tokyo Review
  
  
• “Tokyo’s 2020 Election Devolves into Circus“, Tokyo Review