The University of Osaka · Psychology
Professor Tetsuya Matsubayashi's research lab specializes in comparative politics, public policy, and political behavior, with a focus on how demographic diversity, institutional structures, and economic conditions shape policy outcomes and citizen political attitudes. The lab investigates the interplay between racial and socioeconomic diversity, electoral systems, and policy liberalism, as well as the psychological and behavioral impacts of political representation and economic crises on mental health and suicide rates. A central theme is understanding how contextual factors—such as state size, decentralization, and school calendars—influence democratic support and policy responsiveness.
Figures are computed from collected data and may differ slightly.
How does racial diversity affect public policy outcomes in the states? The policy backlash hypothesis suggests that the presence of blacks increases antagonistic attitudes toward minorities among whites and thus produces racially conservative policies. The electoral constraint hypothesis argues that the presence of blacks increases the size of population that supports policy liberalism and thus results in more liberal policies. The authors reconcile these competing explanations by arguing that t
Our findings strongly indicate that the cyclical pattern of youth suicide is closely related to the school calendar.
Relative age effects have broader consequences than was previously supposed. This study suggests that policy intervention that alleviates the relative age effect can be important.
Government's reaction to economic crises can either exacerbate or mitigate the negative impact of the economic recession on people's mental health and suicide rates.
Objectives. Does size of democracy shape citizens' support for the democratic regime? Previous literature demonstrates that a variety of political contexts are associated with the level of system support among citizens, yet none has tested the effect of a fundamental contextual feature of contemporary societies—size of democracy—on system support from a cross‐national perspective. Methods. Survey data for nations of different sizes in Europe, North America, and Oceania are analyzed using a hiera
Most research on political representation focuses on how citizens’ ideology and partisanship influence their support for political candidates – leaving the question of whether (and how) elected officials influence citizens’ positions on political issues open to debate. The hypothesis tested here – using a unique, quasi-experimental design with American National Election Study data between 1956 and 2004 – is that Democratic representatives shift the opinions of constituents in the pro-Democratic
Do White voters use candidate race as a voting cue in biracial electoral contests? We argue that the answer to this question depends on the level of political knowledge and information that voters have rather than on their attitudes toward minorities. Our analyses of precinct- and individual-level data show that White voters who are likely to be informed about candidates vote less often for the Democratic party when the candidate is Black, whereas vote choices of White voters who are unlikely to
Abstract This article investigates the attitudes of Israeli Jews on the proper relationship between religion and the state, using data from the 2009 Israeli National Election Study. Specifically we test whether association with the secular or religious communities structures mass attitudes on this important dimension of Israeli politics. Mass level disagreement in this area dates back to the pre-state period and represents a longstanding cleavage in Zionist thought and Israeli politics. We find
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