http://www.people.virginia.edu/~ljs2k/daruma.gifWork in Progress

 

“Greener Grass and Local Civic Engagement: The Effects of Housing Market Structures on Politics in the United States and Japan,” is the first product of a new project in which I am exploring the effects of Japan’s housing markets—which make it expensive to move—on political behavior.  I presented this version at the UCLA Workshop on Japan’s Post-Bubble Political Economy in September 2009.

 

Abstract: Japan is often said to have weak civil society organizations at the national level, but it has vibrant levels of civic engagement at the local level, including active neighborhood associations and PTAs.  This paper is the first product of a project exploring the bottom-up forces that generate this local civic activism.  The paper argues that local civic engagement is propelled at least in part by housing market structures that make it expensive for renters and owners to relocate and “exit” when faced with deteriorating conditions in their neighborhoods.  Unable to exit, they are pushed into volunteering and mobilizing at the local level to maintain the quality of their living environment.  This paper focuses on how these dynamics have helped Japan sustain a policy that requires virtually all school children to walk or bike to school, even after cases of child abduction raised parental anxieties.  Japan’s success in maintaining a walk-to-school system is contrasted with the collapse of walk-to-school patterns in the United States after similar incidents.

 

“Path Dependence in the Evolution of Japan’s Party System Since 1993,” began as a paper I presented at the International Political Science Association Meeting in Fukuoka in July 2006 but has since been modified and turned into Chapter 2 in a volume I am editing on The Evolution of Japan’s Party System.  This version is the one that went off to reviewers in September 2009.

 

Abstract: The argument that party systems take shape at critical junctures, and that the subsequent evolution of these systems is constrained by what took place in the past, was made way back in 1967 by Lipset and Rokkan. More recently, Paul Pierson, in his book Politics in Time, has pointed to the stability of party systems as a leading example of the workings of “path dependence.”  But party systems do change, as seen in the way the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) replaced the Japan Socialist Party (JSP) as the leading alternative to the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) during the 1990s.  In this paper, I identify the positive feedback loops that make party systems difficult to disrupt (processes that help explain the stability of the “1955 Party System” in Japan up until 1993).  I then focus on conditions that can disrupt, overwhelm, or make dysfunctional these mechanisms of party system reproduction.  The elimination of the JSP as a significant party and the emergence of the DPJ as the leading alternative to the LDP after 1996 can be explained, I argue, by a particular confluence of sudden changes in the structure of Japan’s policy space.  Change at this critical juncture created an opening for the DPJ to challenge the LDP as an advocate of neoliberal reform, calling for an end to clientelistic economic policies.  While Koizumi dealt the party a setback in 2005 after stealing much of the DPJ platform, the DPJ had already established itself as the leading alternative to the LDP by this time—allowing it market itself in 2009 as a party that support some liberalization (reduced “waste”, less bureaucracy) but also supported a more vibrant social safety net.

 

 

“Exit, Voice, and Family Policy in Japan: Limited Changes Despite Broad Recognition of the Declining Fertility Problem”, began as a paper I presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in the fall of 2005 but has since been shortened and edited for inclusion in a special issue of the Journal of European Social Policy.  This is the version that went to the journal for review in May 2009.

Abstract: Japanese policymakers have been troubled by the ‘declining fertility problem’ for two decades, ever since a sharp drop in births raised public awareness of the issue in 1990.  This paper explores why it took a full decade before government officials diagnosed the problem and called for a shift toward gender-egalitarian labor market policies on the model of Sweden in order to reverse the fertility decline.  It also asks why the prescribed changes have yet to be adopted, despite continued hand-wringing over fertility rates.  Both delays, it argues, stem from the ability of Japanese women—who began entering the workforce in an era when they had already gained full control of their fertility—to ‘exit’ by postponing or opting out of motherhood.  This deprived the reform movement of the ‘voice’ needed to transform male-breadwinner structures that are rooted, not only in public policies, but also in private sector practices.

 

International Cooperation Despite Domestic Conflict: Japanese Politics and the San Francisco Treaties, paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association in New Orleans, March 24-27, 2002.

Abstract: Alliance theory based on unitary rational actor assumptions predicts that states worried about entrapment or abandonment are likely to hesitate before committing to an alliance.  Moreover, two-level game theory predicts that states with divided domestic politics are likely to find it difficult to strike international bargains.  If these theories are correct, polities torn between factions worried, between them, about both abandonment and entrapment should have particular difficulty sustaining support for a security alliance.  This paper challenges these arguments by presenting a two-level model of alliance politics that shows how cooperation can be sustained under these adverse conditions.  The model is then illustrated through an analysis of how Japanese domestic politics shaped the terms of U.S.-Japan security cooperation in the 1950s.

 

 


This page maintained by Leonard Schoppa. Last updated on: September 18, 2009