Kento Ohara
Bachelor of Liberal Arts, MPhil
Thank you for visiting my profile. I am a DPhil student reading Politics at St Antony's College. I recently completed the DPIR's MPhil course in Politics (Comparative Government) with Distinction at St Hugh's College. I study the political economy of accountability, representation and legislative politics in parliamentary systems. Methodologically, I am interested in the application of causal inference designs, experiments and Natural Language Processing techniques in conducting research related to my substantive interests.
Prior to joining the DPIR, I received a Bachelor of Liberal Arts from the University of Tokyo with a major in British Area Studies and a minor in Interdisciplinary Social Sciences. My undergraduate thesis on contemporary British parliamentary reform was awarded the First National High School Memorial (Dean's) Award. I also completed the European Studies Programme at SciencesPo, Paris during my undergraduate study.
Research interests
Substantive topics: accountability, descriptive, substantive and dyadic representation
Area foci: UK, Japan, Germany, Europe
Methods: causal inference designs, experiments, NLP
Degrees
MPhil in Politics (Comparative Government), St Hugh's College, University of Oxford (2024, Distinction)
Bachelor of Liberal Arts (Area Studies major and Interdisciplinary Social Sciences minor), University of Tokyo (2022, Dean's Award)
Visiting positions
Visiting researcher, DYNAMICS research training group, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (summer 2025)
Working papers
Parliamentary reform and executive accountability: The role of non-substantive preferences (MPhil thesis paper)
District magnitude and gender representation in personalised elections
Training
Oxford Spring School in Advanced Research Methods (2025)
Summer Institute in Computational Social Science, Tokyo (online, 2023)
European Studies Programme, SciencesPo, Paris (2020, Grade A+)
Languages
English (professional)
Japanese (native)
French (intermediate)
German (intermediate)
Awards
Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership Flexible Fund Award (2025)
First National High School Memorial (Dean's) Award (2022)