Shiro Kuriwaki

Assistant Professor of Political Science, Yale University (On leave, AY 2024-25)

Resident Fellow at the Institution of Social and Policy Studies

I study the mechanics of American democracy, with a focus on how individual preferences are formed, aggregated, and translated into electoral and legislative outcomes. My secondary focus is on developing statistical methods that improve the measurement of electoral behavior and public opinion. In a series of projects, I am study the structure of voter's party choices across levels of government using cast vote records. In another line of work, I study Congressional representation. I am on leave for the 2024-25 academic year, visiting George Washington University in Washington DC.


Curriculum Vitae

Department Website


shiro.kuriwaki@yale.edu
77 Prospect St, Room A104
Institution for Social and Policy Studies
Yale University
New Haven, CT 06511

swing-D swing-R

Selected Working Papers

Peer-Reviewed Publications

American Politics

Survey Statistics and Demography

Education in Political Science

Teaching

Dissertation

Book Project: Representation in America

(with Stephen Ansolabehere)

This book, tentatively titled Representation in America, argues that through all of the gridlock and the polarization that has plagued the government over the past three decades, the U.S. Congress remains a largely majoritarian institution. Building on 15 years of data on public preferences of more than 500,000 Americans, this study examines what voters know, what they care about when they vote, and how well their legislators and their Congress reflect their preferences. Representation is not a seamless or mechanical process, but it aggregates peoples' beliefs and preferences well on the important issues that face the country. Individual voters do not follow the details of congressional legislation but most know enough to hold correct beliefs about legislation and to hold their representatives accountable. The electoral system is very good at aggregating what the public wants and at moderating hyper-partisan views. And, on just over a half of important bills under our study, Congress makes decisions in line with the majority of the nation. As a result, representation in America, when it does fail, often fails because Congress does not have support among those layers of institutions.

Datasets


About the banner image: Survey data from the Cumulative CCES, limited to validated voters in contested districts who voted for a major party in the Presidency and House. Estimates are made at the congressional district level and use Multilevel Regression Poststratification (MRP) stratifying on age, gender, education from the ACS and using House candidate incumbency status and presidential voteshare as district-level predictors. In presidential years the values represent ticket splitting (e.g. Trump voters who voted for a 2016 Democratic House candidate); in midterm years they represent party switch from the previous presidential election (e.g. Trump voters who voted for a 2018 Democratic House candidate). Districts where a Democrat and Republican candidate did not contest the general election are left blank. Figure created by Shiro Kuriwaki.

About this website: This website uses code from Minimal Mistakes, Github Pages, uses some CSS from Matt Blackwell's website at the time, and is inspired by Sirus Bouchat's website and Andrew Hall's website.