Steven Reed

Steven Robert Reed (born April 4, 1947) is a political scientist and Professor of Modern Government in the Faculty of Policy Studies at Chuo University in Tokyo. He has held positions at the University of Alabama and Harvard University, and he has served as a Visiting Professor at Stanford University, University of Washington, and Chiba University. His main area of research is Japanese elections. Reed "calls himself an 'election junkie,'" and he has gathered and published a critical data-set of Japanese elections after World War II. Reviewers of his books note his "well-deserved reputation for insight and clarity in his writing on Japanese elections," combining "quality scholarship and an accessible writing style." In the field of Comparative Politics, his most cited articles concern Duverger's Law, especially testing and extending this principle in light of data from Japan and Italy. In Making Votes Count, Gary W. Cox credits Reed as "the first to note the 'M + 1 equilibrium'... in his article extending Duverger's Law to the Japanese case." He also engaged in related debates about the M + 1 equilibrium. Eric C. Browne and Dennis Patterson extended and interpreted this principle in terms of rational choice theory, while their interpretation was contested by Gary W. Cox, and Reed also argued strongly against "the idea of rational calculation as the mechanism that produced the observed behavior." Based on his experience of teaching about Japan in the United States, Reed has also written a book, Making Common Sense of Japan, which "demystifies various stereotypes about Japanese culture while revealing the naivete of culture-driven arguments about Japanese political economy." Read even beyond Political Science, one reviewer even noted that the book "rings down the curtain on what-Japan-is-like debates."