現在ミラノ大学 (the University of Milan) に派遣されているWilly Jou助教の、派遣先での研究状況をご紹介いたします。
The main purpose of my stay in Milan is to complete a book co-authored with Professor Luigi Curini at the University of Milan and Professor Vincenzo Memoli at the University of Catania. The book is titled ‘Why Policy Representation Matters: The consequences of ideological proximity between citizens and their governments’. The book manuscript was nearing completion by the time I arrived in Milan. During my stay, I have been meeting with Professor Curini on a regular basis to work on the final, concluding chapter, as well as making revisions to previous chapters. Publication is expected in the latter part of 2015.
As its title suggests, the book addresses why and how citizen-government ideological proximity is important. Specifically, we use two cross-national datasets (the World Values Survey and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems) to explore how distance on the left-right scale affects two modes of political participation (voting and other activities); satisfaction with democracy; and subjective evaluation of personal well-being. We undertook this project because whereas many scholars have examined what causes ideological proximity, but to our knowledge there have been very few works on its consequences. Results of multi-level statistical analyses show that proximity does indeed have a significant impact on each of these aspects of political attitudes and behavior.