Email    CV    Book   Courses (and other info for students)  Office Hours

Ethan Scheiner is a faculty member in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Davis. 

His research focuses on Japanese politics and general issues surrounding democratic representation. He received a B.A. in Politics in 1991 at U.C. Santa Cruz, an M.A. in Political Science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1994, and a Ph.D. in Political Science at Duke University in 2001.  He has been an Advanced Research (postdoctoral) Fellow in the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at Harvard University (2001-02), and a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Institute for International Studies (2002-2004).

His work examines parties and elections within both Japan-specific and explicitly comparative contexts.  He has published articles on political parties, elections and electoral systems in the American Political Science Review, Annual Review of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Electoral Studies, Japanese Journal of Political Science, and Legislative Studies Quarterly. 

His first book, Democracy Without Competition in Japan: Opposition Failure in a One-Party Dominant State (Cambridge University Press) offers an explanation for opposition party failure in Japan, a democracy dominated by one party since 1955.  The book offers analysis of not only Japanese opposition failure, but party competition failure in other countries as well.  For more information on Democracy Without Competition in Japan and additional information (including statistics) cut from the manuscript (for space reasons), click here.

Professor Scheiner is currently working on a book manuscript on mixed-member electoral systems, where voters are offered two ballots, one for a candidate in single member district (SMD) balloting and one for a party in proportional representation (PR) (with Robert Moser of the University of Texas at Austin).  The project examines the impact of mixed-member systems in 15 countries throughout the world.

He has also begun a project examining bureaucratic discretion and legislative-bureaucratic relations in Japan (with Michio Muramatsu of Gakushuin University in Tokyo, Ellis Krauss of UC San Diego, and Robert Pekkanen of the University of Washington).

For other information on his work, please see his CV.

Contact Information:

Ethan Scheiner

Department of Political Science

University of California at Davis
One Shields Avenue

Davis CA, 95616

    Phone: (530)754 8176
    Fax: (530)752-8666

    Email Address:  escheiner@ucdavis.edu.

Personal