Local Politics and National Policy: Multi-level Conflicts in Japan and Beyond

After the 1990s, the Japanese government proceeded with decentralization reforms like other advanced democracies. The reforms delegated decision-making power to local governments who could hardly make independent decisions under the direction of the central government. Before the reforms, political scientists focused on how local governments made autonomous choices under national guidance, which enforced uniform behaviors among the local governments (Reed 1986; Muramatsu 1997). However, after the decentralizing reforms, political scientists began analyzing local decision-making based on the premise that local governments had obtained a certain degree of discretion. These later analyses revealed that local governments’ decisions are strongly influenced by inter-party competition at the local level, the relationship between local executives and local assemblies, and the behaviors of similar kinds of local governments (Ito 2002; Soga and Machidori 2007; Sunahara 2011). In the past two decades, local political analysis seems to have become one of the most developed fields of political science in Japan.