Yohei Nakayama

Biography

Yohei Nakayama is Professor of European Political History at the Faculty of Law, University of Tokyo. His research focuses on the political history of postwar France. He is known to French historians through his extensive archival research, and some of his work has been published in French. His focus is on explaining the particularities of French politics from the perspective of comparison with other European countries.

In the first stage of his career, Yohei was fascinated by the strange internal dynamics of the socialist SFIO and the Christian democratic MRP, the principal ruling parties of the Fourth Republic. His first book described how party activists (militants) persistently tried to control the actions of their parties’ MPs and ministers—which led to the Fourth Republic’s difficulties and its demise.

For the last decade, Yohei has concentrated on another project, which aims to explain the Gaullists’ dominance (1958-81), by comparing it with the Italian Christian Democrats and the Japanese Liberal-Democrats. Based on the principal results of this research, he is working on a new book entitled "Decentralizing Postwar France from Below." More recently, he has begun work on a new project dealing with the “feedback effects” of the welfare state upon the political structures of European nations.

Yohei was a Fulbright visiting scholar at Cornell University in 2004-2005, and a visiting scholar at CEVIPOF, Sciences Po, Paris and previously at CES in 2005-2006.

This information is accurate for the time period that the scholar is affiliated with CES.

Affiliations

• Professor of European Political History, Faculty of Law, University of Tokyo
• Visiting Scholar, CES, Harvard University

Publications

• Yohei Nakayama, A Political Experiment in Post-War France: the Fourth Republic and its ‘Organized Parties,’ in Japanese. (University of Tokyo Press, 2002).
• Yohei Nakayama, "Le groupe CDC et la politique d'équipement du territoire de 1928 à 1967. De la participation passive à l'hégémonie « technocratique » ?", in Philippe Verheyde et Michel Margairaz (eds), Les politiques des territoires. La Caisse des dépôts et consignations, les institutions financières et les politiques de développement et d'aménagement des territoires en France au XXe siècle, P.I.E. Peter Lang, pp.67-86, 2014.
• Yohei Nakayama, "Une étude comparative du dynamisme de l'aménagement urbain des années 1960. Les cas de la Loire et de l'Isère", in Verheyde et Margairaz (eds), Les politiques des territoires, op.cit., pp. 87-102, 2014.
• Yohei Nakayama, "La construction de logement et les investissements d’équipement annexes des années 1930 au milieu des années 1960", Histoire urbaine no.23, pp. 55-69, 2008.
• Yohei Nakayama, "Associations, Party Models and Party System: Changing Patterns of Party Networks in 20th-Century France", French Politics 7-2 (2009), 96-122, 2009.