At Keio University, Professor Yuko Kasuya, in the Department of Political Science, Faculty of Law, is pursuing several research projects seeking ways to make democracy work better, based on the key idea of "accountability relationships."
Q "The concept of accountability has received a great deal of attention during the last 20-30 years, in the context of the theory of democracy. Regarding democracy, most discussion has centered on elections, but there's more to democracy than elections; it has to be considered in a wider framework. So, accountability has emerged as an important concept when expressing that idea. Basically, the purpose of looking at accountability is to make democracy work better, or function better."
Accountability relations mean, in general, that A can impose sanctions on B, or ask B to provide information. When this concept is applied to the political process, it can be interpreted as establishing a principal-agent relationship in various scenarios, including between voters and politicians, party members and leaders, and Cabinet members and government officials.
Q "The concept of accountability can be applied to various stages of political process, but the accountability relationships I'm specifically looking at currently concern voters and politicians. In particular, I'm researching the problem of malapportionment. For example, in countries such as the Philippines, Brazil, and Kenya, the geographic disparity in the value of votes is 4-5 times higher than in Japan. I do cross-national comparison to investigate what factors influence this disparity . The factor I'm currently analyzing is the role of the judiciary and vote disparity. My argument is that when a country has a judiciary that is more independent and interventionist, malapportionment tends to be lower. In addition to a cross-national statistical analysis, I'm also conducting case studies of Malaysia and the US."
Another focus of Professor Kasuya's has been on governmental transparency. Because it's possible that increasing access to the information held by governments ehnances voters' ability to hold politicians and governments accountable, this is also an important topic of accountability research. Also, for the general public to know more about how accountability relationships matter in politics, Kasuya is running a website called "the democracy lab", which compiles interesting ideas and case studies about accountability politics.
Q "As I mentioned, accountability is a very abstract concept, but I think that the projects I'm doing are fairly concrete, to such an extent that some policy recommendations can be made. For example, regarding the problem of malapportionment, my research shows that one of the causes of malapportionment is the weakness of the judiciary. So, a policy recommendation on this problem would be to provide enabling environment for the judiciary to play a larger part in this issue. My hope is that my accountability research could generate policy implications like this."
