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Title: | The Impact of Municipal Mergers on Local Public Spending: Evidence from Remote-Sensing Data |
Authors: | Pickering, S Tanaka, S Yamada, K |
Keywords: | municipal merger;size of political unit;urban-rural divide;remote-sensing data;Japan |
Issue Date: | 3-Apr-2020 |
Publisher: | Cambridge University Press on behalf of the East Asia Institute |
Citation: | Pickering, S., Tanaka, S. and Yamada, K. (2020) 'The Impact of Municipal Mergers on Local Public Spending: Evidence from Remote-Sensing Data', Journal of East Asian Studies, 20 (2), pp. 243 - 266 (24 pp.). doi: 10.1017/jea.2020.1. |
Abstract: | © The Author(s) 2020. How are resources distributed when administrative units merge? We take advantage of recent, large-scale municipal mergers in Japan to systematically study the impact of municipal mergers within merged municipalities and, in particular, what politicians do when their districts and constituencies suddenly change. We argue that when rural and sparsely populated municipalities merge with more urban and densely populated municipalities, residents of the former are likely to see a reduced share of public spending because they lost political leverage through the merger. Our empirical analyses detect changes in public spending before and after the municipal mergers with remote sensing data, which allows for flexible units of analysis and enables us to proxy for spending within merged municipalities. Overall, our results show that politicians tend to reduce benefits allocated to areas where there are a small number of voters, while increasing the allocation to more populous areas. The micro-foundation of our argument is also corroborated by survey data. The finding suggests that, all things being equal, the quantity rather than quality of electorates matters for politicians immediately after political units change. |
Description: | Earlier versions of the article were presented at the Annual Midwest Political Science Association National Conference, the Annual Conference of the European Political Science Association, and the Japanese Association of Electoral Studies Annual Meeting. The supplementary material for this article can be found at https://doi.org/10.1017/jea.2020.1. |
URI: | https://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/20016 |
DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1017/jea.2020.1 |
ISSN: | 1598-2408 |
Appears in Collections: | Dept of Social and Political Sciences Research Papers |
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