Ayako Hiramatsu

I have been working on two related areas of American politics in the recent years. They both pertain to the democratization of American south in the middle of the 20th century.

One is the federal enforcement of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. I have authored two research articles, both of which are now published. “The Second, Selective Reconstruction” (Studies in American Political Development, vol. 39, no. 2, October 2025) examines the administrative justifications the Justice Department gave to the federal examiner appointment. The other article is given an English title, “Polyarchy and Political Representation after Democratization in the American South,” and is published in Japanese in The American Review (vol. 58, March 2024). The piece looks at another aspect of the law’s federal enforcement, the pre-clearance requirement of changes in the state and local election laws, which came to be more politically contested in the subsequent decades than the examiner appointment.

The other area of research is political parties. My PhD dissertation, which was submitted to the Political Science Department at the Johns Hopkins University in 2017, probed the Democratic Party reforms that followed the rapid expansion of political suffrage in the 1960s. I am in the process of rewriting it into a book manuscript.

Those two profound developments, which took place sixty years ago, are still relevant today as Americans re-envision its own democracy, and Americanists understand the country’s many twists and turns in politics.