Nottingham graduate Matthew Morris (BSc Economics, 2023) was recently invited to present his undergraduate dissertation research at the Japanese Politics Online Seminar Series, curated by scholars at Harvard, NYU, UPenn and other prestigious US institutions.
His thesis, entitled ‘Deindustrialisation and Election Outcomes’ transported the popular economic voting literature to one of the most industrialised countries in the world: Japan. Matthew adopted a Bartik instrument to causally identify the impact of changes in local manufacturing employment using prefectural level data over 1983-2012. His results did not show any shift in votes to the ‘right’ of the political spectrum as a result of deindustrialisation, but charted an increase in the support for nationalist and isolationist parties, to the detriment of the Liberal Democratic Party which has been in power almost continuously since 1955. Matthew then used a small individual-level dataset to suggest that the observed nationalist reaction was most pronounced among young and elderly voters.
Matthew says: "When approaching my dissertation, I spent a lot of time exploring potential research avenues within the context of my academic interests so that I could formulate a research question that I not only found personally motivating, but one that may be interesting to scholars within the field. Having this foundation provided me with greater methodological and analytical clarity, as I had become intimately familiar with how the existing literature had addressed the topic my research was focused on."
Matthew is currently in the process of applying for graduate courses in political science and political economy for 2024 entry.
Posted on Thursday 4th January 2024