We apologize that we have had to cancel this event. Please note that we have arranged for a new lecture for the same time and location.

Japan is a critical case in a comparative array of welfare states. Contemporary welfare states achieve higher equality by raising revenue from a regressive consumption tax than from a progressive income tax to be redistributed through public expenditures. Politics of taxation matters for this unexpected consequence among long democracies.

Junko Kato (Ph.D., Yale University) is Professor of Political Science at the University of Tokyo. She has conducted research in comparative politics on taxation and the welfare state, party coalitions and government formation, and neuro-cognitive analyses of social decision and behavior. She has authored articles in American Political Science Review, the British Journal of Political Science, Electoral Studies, Governance, and so on. She has authored two books: The Problem of Bureaucratic Rationality (Princeton University Press, 1994) and Regressive Taxation and the Welfare State (Cambridge University Press, 2003) in addition to numerous book chapters. She was a co-editor-in-chief of the Japanese Journal of Political Science (2019–2023) and worked as a member of the Editorial Board of journals including the British Journal of Political Science (1996–2016), Perspectives on Public Management and Governance (2016–), and Journal of East Asian Studies (2021–). She has launched neuro-cognitive approaches to social sciences and published articles on fMRI experiments of human decision and behavior in Frontiers in Neuroscience, Scientific Reports, and Cerebral Cortex.

This lecture is made possible with the generous support of the U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant.

If there is anything we can do to make this event accessible to you, please contact us at wugou@umich.edu. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.