Municipality Merger and Local Democracy: An assessment of the merger of Japanese municipalities.

Abstract

Municipal mergers have been widely used as a tool for administrative reform (Fox and Gurley-Calvez 2006; OECD 2014). While municipal mergers have been planned or implemented with the hope of increasing efficiencies in service provisions, their impacts on local democracy have been neglected (Hansen 2013, 2015; Kjaer, Hjelmar, and Leth Olsen 2010). In particular, little is known as to how mergers affect performance of local legislatures. In filling these gaps, this study uses a dataset of 754 Japanese city-level governments from 2008 to 2014 to examine how mergers influ-ence legislative performance. After controlling for potential confounding factors, the analysis shows that municipal merger is negatively correlated to legislative performance. Specifically, new local councils created through merger are less likely to propose municipal bylaws than non-merged councils. This study contributes to the existing studies by examining the neglected dimension of merger effects in an understudied Asian developed country: Japanese local governments. Key Words: Administrative Reform, Municipal Merger, Legislative Performance, Panel Analysis