Interview with New WEAI Member Dan Smith

The Weatherhead East Asian Institute is excited to introduce Professor Daniel M. Smith, a recent addition to the WEAI community.

Daniel M. Smith is the Gerald L. Curtis Visiting Associate Professor of Modern Japanese Politics and Foreign Policy in the Department of Political Science and School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.

His interests cover a range of topics in Japanese politics, comparative politics, political economy, and political behavior. A core substantive focus of his research and teaching is political representation in democracies, especially how institutions such as electoral systems affect voting behavior and the demographic backgrounds and behavior of political elites.

He is the author of Dynasties and Democracy (Stanford University Press, 2018) and articles appearing in journals such as the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and Political Analysis. He is also a co-editor of the Japan Decides election series.

Prior to coming to Columbia University, he was assistant and then associate professor in the Department of Government at Harvard University. He received his MA (2009) and PhD (2012) in political science from the University of California, San Diego, and his BA (2005) in political science and Italian from the University of California, Los Angeles. From 2012 to 2013, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) at Stanford University. 

In a recent interview, we spoke with Professor Smith about his work and current projects. 

First, could you please introduce your background and research interests?

I grew up in California, and studied at UCLA (BA), UCSD (MA, PhD), and Stanford (postdoctoral fellowship at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center) before moving to the East Coast (I am finally getting used to the winters!).

My research covers a range of topics in Japanese politics and comparative politics. A core focus in recent years is political representation in democracies, especially how institutions such as electoral rules shape voting behavior, as well as the demographic backgrounds and behavior of politicians. I study these questions primarily using the case of Japan, but also use data from other parliamentary democracies in Western Europe and elsewhere around the world.

My first book, Dynasties and Democracy (Stanford University Press 2018), explains why political dynasties (two or more elected politicians from the same family) are more prevalent in some countries (like Japan) than others. The book investigates the advantages that members of dynasties enjoy throughout their careers—from candidate selection, to election, to promotion into higher offices—and provides lessons from Japan for other democracies where dynasties are seen as a problem, such as the Philippines, Indonesia, and India.

What initially drew you to studying Japanese politics?

My older brother, Nathaniel, first introduced me to Japan. He is a cultural anthropologist who studies right-wing activist groups in Japan, among other topics. When I was an undergraduate student at UCLA, I studied Italian and was initially more interested in Europe than Japan. After living with my brother in Tokyo one summer, I realized that Japan could be a useful case for comparison to Italy in terms of political development, party politics, and political reform. I initially started studying Japanese language and politics for this instrumental purpose, but fell more and more in love with Japan and was increasingly fascinated by Japanese politics as I studied.

One of the books that first got me hooked on Japanese politics was The Japanese Way of Politics (Columbia University Press 1988), by Gerald L. Curtis. I often find myself returning to themes from this work in my own research on elections and parties in Japan, so it is a great honor to be in the Curtis Chair at Columbia. I hope to grow this legacy by cultivating interest in Japanese politics and US-Japan relations in new generations of students at Columbia and beyond.

What, in your view, makes Japanese politics interesting (or at the very least, unique)?

Perhaps the biggest puzzle about Japanese politics is how the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has managed to stay in power consistently since it was founded in 1955, surviving various domestic and international changes over time. The party has only been out of government twice (1993-1994 and 2009-2012), making it one of the most successful parties in all democracies around the world. But public opinion surveys often reveal that voters do not necessarily support its policies––so why does it always win? Another aspect of Japanese politics I find interesting is the persistent underrepresentation of women and young people in politics, and how this intersects with LDP dominance and political dynasties.

In other ways, I think Japan is not necessarily “unique,” but is at the forefront of issues that will confront other countries, such as an aging population, climate change and natural disasters, and how to build sustainable cities while also confronting the economic and social consequences of the hollowing out of rural communities. I think Japan is important to understand in its own right, but also that Japan’s experiences and innovations might offer general lessons that are of broad relevance to social scientists and policy makers.

Is there a facet of Japanese or comparative politics that you feel is understudied or which poses an ongoing challenge for scholars like yourself?

There is so much to study in Japan! I would love to see the case of Japan incorporated into more comparative studies of politics, but many researchers in the US still view Japan as exotic, or simply haven’t considered how it might fit into broader comparisons across countries. As a comparative politics expert who studies Japan, I try to make these connections across cases to expand the general interest and understanding of Japan beyond those who are already familiar.

The biggest challenge for researchers and students in recent years has been the difficulty in traveling to Japan due to the pandemic. In addition to the short-term problem this creates for research and language training, it may also have a long-term negative impact on interest in Japan among future students. The situation is starting to look more promising, and I hope to create some buzz around the study of Japan to ensure that when Japan begins to open up, students will be ready to visit to explore and learn.

You held six events this year about Japanese politics. Can you introduce those events and share your most significant takeaways?

The fall semester was particularly exciting for me because Japan held the first general election for its lower house since 2017, and I co-edit a book series on Japanese elections called Japan Decides. The two WEAI Zoom events offered a preview of what to expect (before the election) and a post-election retrospective to explain what happened. Each event assembled a fantastic panel of experts, including several contributors to Japan Decides 2021, which will soon be published by Palgrave Macmillan.

The puzzling outcome of the election was that the LDP maintained a large majority of seats despite voter dissatisfaction and pre-election polls suggesting the party would lose many seats to the opposition parties, which coordinated nominations and policy to avoid competing amongst themselves rather than challenging the LDP and its coalition partner, Komeito. This election outcome may reflect voters’ cautious attitudes toward rejecting the governing party in the midst of the pandemic.

My spring programming for WEAI featured four online Zoom events around the theme of “Japan on the Front Line,” building on a recent report in The Economist about how Japan is a harbinger when it comes to many issues that will soon confront other countries, such as population aging and natural disasters from climate change. Speakers covered looming challenges facing Japan in its demography and family structure, national security, and regional economic leadership in the Indo-Pacific. These events underscored how important it is to understand Japan if one wants to fully understand the rest of the world.

Can you speak about your current research and any upcoming projects?

I am currently working on several projects related to Japan. One large-scale project investigates the comparative development and effects of institutions of democracy using recently digitized data on more than 11 million legislative speeches in Japan going back to 1890, thus covering the growth and collapse of party politics prior to World War II, and the country’s postwar transformation into a liberal democracy and the world’s third-largest economy. The first paper in this project, coauthored with Max Goplerud, investigates the role of electoral institutions in the development of party-centered government accountability in Japan. We document how the party-strengthening 1994 electoral system reform facilitated a dramatic increase in ministerial accountability (rather than bureaucratic accountability) to Diet committees.

A second large-scale project, in collaboration with Masataka Harada and Gaku Ito, investigates the long-term socioeconomic and political legacies of community-level destruction, using the case of the US firebombing of Tokyo in World War II. This project speaks to a growing literature in economics, history, and political science on how historical events shape socioeconomic and political outcomes well into the future. Understanding whether and how societies recover from destruction may provide important global lessons for how to create resilient communities able to withstand the inevitable challenges that will come from repeated natural disasters caused by climate change and man-made disasters caused by war. Our first paper shows that the more heavily-damaged neighborhoods have continued to experience relatively lower performance on multiple socioeconomic indicators, and lower levels of social capital, into the present day.

As with my previous research, my aim with these new projects is to use data and evidence from Japan to speak to broader questions in comparative politics related to institutions, representation, and political behavior in democracies.