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    Canadian Political Science Association
    2020 Annual Conference Programme

    Confronting Political Divides
    Hosted at Western University
    Tuesday, June 2 to Thursday, June 4, 2020
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    Presidential Address:
    Barbara Arneil, CPSA President

    Origins:
    Colonies and Statistics

    Location:
    Tuesday, June 2, 2020 | 05:00pm to 06:00pm
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    KEYNOTE SPEAKER:
    Ayelet Shachar
    The Shifting Border:
    Legal Cartographies of Migration
    and Mobility

    Location:
    June 04, 2020 | 01:30 to 03:00 pm
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    Keynote Speaker: Marc Hetherington
    Why Modern Elections
    Feel Like a Matter of
    Life and Death

    Location:
    Wednesday, June 3, 2020 | 03:45pm to 05:15pm
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    Plenary Panel
    Indigenous Politics and
    the Problem of Canadian
    Political Science

    Location: Arts & Humanities Building - AHB 1R40
    Tuesday, June 2, 2020 | 10:30am to 12:00pm

Comparative Politics



B18 - Voters, Politicians, and Public Policy: A Comparative Perspective

Date: Jun 4 | Time: 12:00pm to 01:30pm | Location:


Session Abstract: This panel will investigate how democracy throughout the world works by focusing on the behaviour of politicians. As past studies have revealed, politicians behave to maximize their re-election and achieve their career goals and preferred policies. This panel will review politicians’ behaviour by focusing on three stages of political processes. First, voters choose politicians at an election. Second, politicians behave to reflect voters’ preference. Third, public policy appears after interaction among politicians at parliament. With four presentations that implement comparative studies on these topics, this panel will provide an abundance of rich information outlining how politicians behave at the central government level and the consequences on public policy. First, using conjoint analysis of voters’ information about political candidates, Nakamura will deal with how voters cast their votes to one candidate. Second, Funaki will analyze the role of citizen protests in the impeachment of presidents in a democracy, using Brazil as a case study. Third, Kido will examine how the political careers of parliament members in Canada has affected their activity as policymakers between 1988 and 2019. Fourth, Kato and Tokuhisa will finalize the panel by providing theoretical debates on public policy. Their presentation will reveal how exceptional cases have contributed to theory building in comparative politics by comparing the development of welfare states in Australia and Japan.


Application of Conjoint Analyses and Eye Tracking Techniques: Etsuhiro Nakamura (Aichi Gakuin University)
Abstract: Because the methodological foundations and online survey platforms for conjoint analysis have been developed, conjoint analysis has been used widely to analyze Japanese electoral politics and candidate choice by voters. Although these analysis provide very interesting insights, they are based on verbal descriptions of candidates. Recently, several studies indicated the importance of visual information about candidates. Some scholars contended that voters infer important traits, such as competence, from candidates’ faces. Other researchers found that attractiveness helps candidate win more votes. Japanese electoral studies using conjoint analysis have not incorporated the facial information into their analysis so far. Although a great deal of experimental evidence suggests that better-looking candidates have some electoral advantages, the extent to which voters use facial information compared with other information remains unknown. For example, candidates’ faces convey information about their ages and genders. It is remains unclear whether age and gender or facial information has the stronger effect. The comparison of facial information and policy platforms is another important research target, but researchers are unsure how facial information affects the voters’ choices. Thus, in order to fill the gap between the conjoint literature and facial information research, in this paper, I examine whether facial information affects voters’ choices even when other traits are controlled. I accomplish this using conjoint analysis to compare verbal and pictorial descriptions of candidates. Then, I investigate whether voters’ information processing styles are influenced by facial information using eye tracking techniques. Finally, I summarize the experimental results and present this study’s conclusions.


The Relation Between Massive Protests and Presidential Removal: A Case Study of President Rousseff, Brazil, 2016 : Ritsuko Funaki (Chuo University / York University)
Abstract: This study aims to analyze the role of citizen protests in the impeachment of presidents in a democracy. In the last two decades, despite the procedural complexity of executive impeachment, several world leaders have been removed as a result of misconduct or corruption charges. Such impeachments took place in democratic countries affected by the so-called “third wave of democratization,” a process marked, in each case, by mass demonstrations, which this study assumes to be a critical factor for impeachment realization. That strong citizen engagement has been co-present with impeachment invites two critical questions—why did protests accompany perceived leadership failures in particular countries and to what extent did civil unrest influence the removal of a president? Our study seeks first to explore and then to answer these questions. This study analyses a case of Brazil to establish both the causal conditions and the mechanism of impeachment and removal of former President Dilma Rousseff in 2016. The analysis is based on qualitative data taken from both primary sources (congressional proceedings and press reports) and secondary sources (previous studies). The research first explains the institutional settings and the political landscape in Brazil at that time. It then examines the key political actors’ behaviors and discourse and how those changed after demonstrations began. The study also indicates the political use of media to provoke the mass protests, which influenced congressional decisions throughout the impeachment process. This analysis will provide a useful insights into the causes of such impeachments.


Connecting Intergovernmental Relations? Career Paths of Canadian Parliament Members: Hideki Kido (Kyoto Women's University)
Abstract: This presentation will examine the political careers of parliament members in Canada. I will focus on how many politicians are moving into the federal government from the provincial and/or municipal level. Many studies show that parliament members in the Canadian federal government started out in professional occupations such as accounting, legal practice, and medicine before becoming politicians. This is because the federal political party is completely separated from the provincial party in Canada, and provincial and/or municipal politicians are not regarded as significant resources for the federal parliament. Even though it is often said that local autonomy is the school of democracy, Canadian local and/or provincial politics is separated from its federal politics in terms of political careers. My presentation will question this aspect of political careerism in Canada and examine how many federal politicians are coming from the provincial and/or municipal level and how they behave in the parliament. Indeed, over 25% members of the House of Commons after the 2015 election have had a previous political career at the provincial and/or municipal level. These parliament members would behave in parliament to reflect provincial/local interest in the policymaking process. To reveal this, this presentation will investigate the former jobs of all parliament members in the House of Commons between 1988 to 2019, including former party affiliation and types of political careers, such as mayor, provincial legislative assembly member, etc.


Theoretical Importance of Exceptional Cases: Japan and Australia in Comparative Welfare State Research: Masatoshi Kato (Ritsumeikan University), Kyoko Tokuhisa (Ritsumeikan University)
Abstract: This paper shows how exceptional cases contribute to theory-building in comparative politics. Since the publication of Esping-Andersen's “The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism”(1990), scholars in comparative welfare state research have been discussing the validity of his typology. While many researchers agreed with its importance, such as focusing on the qualitative diversity of welfare state, some argued that it could not capture the features of the welfare models in East Asia and Australia, which rely on family welfare or employment security. Hence, they tried to add new types, such as “the East Asian Welfare Model”(Goodman et. al 1998) and “the Australia's Welfare State”(Castles 2001). While these studies clarify the features of the models, they are too descriptive to fully generate theoretical progress. Recently, more analytical concepts such as “functional equivalents” (Estevez-Abe 2008) and “familialism regime” (Shinkawa 2013) were introduced. Because previous studies primarily focus on developing the typology, they can’t fully contribute to the welfare state theory. Thus, it is important to understand the implication of these new studies with reference to the exceptional cases. This study analyzes the development and dynamism of the welfare state in Japan and Australia briefly, and considers their theoretical contribution to welfare state research. We show that analyzing the divergence from “Employment-based Welfare State” in different times contributes towards designing both frameworks for structural analysis and causal mechanism.




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