Kyohei Yamada

Removing Boundaries, Losing Connections: Electoral Consequences of Local Government Reform in Japan

This paper examines the role of local politicians in affecting national-level election outcomes by focusing on the drastic municipal mergers in Japan that took place in the early 2000s. Specifically, we argue that the political party that relies most extensively on local politicians’ efforts for electoral mobilization and monitoring will suffer an electoral slump when municipalities are merged and the number of municipal politicians is swiftly reduced. We empirically show that municipalities with a history of mergers exhibit significantly lower voter turnout and obtain a smaller vote share for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in national elections when compared to other municipalities without an experience of mergers. This result indicates that municipal politicians are indispensable human resources for LDP candidates running for the national parliament.

From a Majority to a Minority How Municipal Mergers in Japan Changed the Distribution of Political Powers and the Allocation of Public Services Within a Merged Municipality

This article examines whether or not municipal mergers change the perceived level of public services within a merged municipality. I argue that residents of small municipalities that merge with larger neighbors lose political powers after the mergers; they become a minority within a merged municipality, and their electoral importance declines accordingly. As a result, the level of public services to the merged localities is expected to decrease. I test this argument by focusing on the nationwide concurrence of municipal mergers in Japan that rapidly took place in the 2000s. I conducted a survey of voters in rural municipalities that merged and those that remained intact during this wave of mergers. Using the responses to the survey, I demonstrate that the level of public services, as perceived by the respondents, declined more significantly in municipalities with mergers than in municipalities without.