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 political behavior. She has authored articles in numerous journals, including the American Political Science Review and the British Journal of Political Science. 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 has been a member of the Editorial Board of British Journal of Political Science and Japanese Journal of Political Science. Since 2006, she has launched interdisciplinary research applying a neuro-cognitive approach to the analysis of political behavior．She has published articles on fMRI experiments of political behavior in Frontiers in Neuroscience and the one on the geometric modeling of political similarity judgment in PLOS ONE.
Award Information
This project aims to investigate a neglected side of public finance, that is, the tax revenue structure, and proposes a comparative study of industrial democracies to fulfill this research purpose. More specifically, the project will explore the reasons for the increased share of the total tax revenue coming from a tax on consumption and will examine the socioeconomic and political factors that contribute to such a change in the tax revenue share in industrial democracies. It combines both quantitative and qualitative analyses, and examines how major political economic changes, such as the transition to a welfare state and the economic globalization, influence and interact with the changes in the tax revenue structure of these countries.
