Thank you to our 5 speakers for joining this year's Yale MacMillan Center CEAS Japan as Future series! 🙏 Tom Phuong Le Pomona College Henry Laurence Bowdoin College Junko Kato 東京大学 | UTokyo Erin Chung Johns Hopkins University Kenneth McElwain 東京大学 | UTokyo Grateful to Japan Foundation 国際交流基金 for their support!

Our Spring 2025 poll is out today! We are an undergraduate-led research group funded by Yale ISPS, focusing on what young people think about our democracy. Here are some key insights from our research: 1/🧵

Yale undergrads' Yale Poll Spring 2025 poll of young American voters and the general population just released. Lots of data on topics ranging from the '28 primary to taxes on university endowments, knowledge of government spending, and views on democratic reforms. Link below

Excited to visit FSI Stanford Shorenstein APARC on Monday to discuss my book project on youth representation and its implications for policymaking and democracy. aparc.fsi.stanford.edu/events/silver-…

Next week, NYU Politics Department is hosting the third iteration of Frontiers in Empirical Research on East Asia (FEREA). Erik Wang and I are excited to showcase exceptional works-in-progress on an under-studied yet vitally important region of the world.

NEW WORKING PAPER Many people warn that LLMs pose threats to democratic societies through their persuasive capabilities. How should we evaluate these claims? In this project, we discuss limitations of existing evaluations and present our own framework (1/6)

The Experimental Research section of the American Political Science Association invites research proposals from post-prospectus PhD students for its Experimental Research Early-Career Fellowship program. Share this post! APSA

Glad this paper is finally out in American Political Science Review, five years after we began the project. Hope it proves useful to researchers. cambridge.org/core/journals/…

Big week ahead: 1️⃣ I officially become Associate Professor (with tenure!) 2️⃣ Launching my lab Z-CAFE (@ Yale 210 Prospect, 3rd floor!) 3️⃣ Kicking off the Yale Population Studies Speaker Series—excited to build community around population research!

New paper with Adam Auerbach in JDS. Exploration of how cities expand outwards--it's often a citizen-led phenomenon, where people just buy up agricultural land and build on it. Can create problems for getting access to services, but citizens are also creative problem-solvers!

Excited to join Yale Young Global Scholars again this year! I’ll be giving three talks on youth representation to 450 high school students from over 60 countries. Looking forward to hearing whether they’d ever consider running for office.

Truly an honor to attend the celebration of Sheila's decades of leadership and impact on U.S.-Japan relations. Grateful to have learned so much from her over the years. 🇺🇸🇯🇵

New publication: Nick Szechenyi, Yuko Nakano, and I have a new explainer out on Japan's Upper House election. We unpack key outcomes, the issues that shaped voter decisions, and the implications for Japan’s domestic agenda and foreign policy trajectory: csis.org/analysis/japan…

Japan elected a record 42 women to the Upper House—a step forward for gender representation. But our new article shows how visible progress in some areas can coexist with deeper patterns of inequality. w/ Paul Christensen, Cindi SturtzSreetharan, Charles Crabtree academic.oup.com/ssjj/article/2…

U.S.-Japan Network for the Future Members Charles McClean, Cindi SturtzSreetharan, Paul Christensen, and Charles Crabtree write in @socialsciencejapan write in Social Science Japan Journal about Japan's efforts on UN Strategic Development Goals related to poverty, hunger, and gender equality

Excited that our (apoorva.lal, Yiqing Xu, Gary ziwen_Zu) paper won the Political Analysis' 2024 Editor's Choice award! It was really a lot of work (we started this in 2018!), so nice to see we've had some impact on the field. It's also open access. cambridge.org/core/journals/…

I wrote a piece about Japan's recent upper house election in East Asia Forum eastasiaforum.org/2025/07/27/jap…

"IO Endorsements, Perceived Alignment, and Public Support for Unpopular Policies" with Saki Kuzushima (sakikuzushima.github.io), Itsuki Umeyama, and Kenneth McElwain is now accepted (pending successful replication of empirical results) at International Studies Quarterly! shiraito.github.io/research/pages…

Honored to receive the Editors’ Choice award from PA.

Child penalties for women: #SouthKorea and #Japan look darkest among developed democracies. Probably fertility correlates strongly as well.