Greetings, and I hope Forum members are surviving the hot weather. The next session of the Shaken dissertation workshop will be on July 28.* This time the focus is domestic politics. Kyohei Yamada, who is finishing up field work for his dissertation at Yale, is going to talk about the causes and consequences of municipal mergers. Between 1999 and 2010, there were
625 mergers involving 2,104 municipalities, dropping their number from 3,232 to 1,727.

Kyohei argues that the mergers reduced the political weight of rural voters, at prefectural and national levels, because there are now fewer mayors and assemblymen to speak up for them, and also within the newly-merged municipalities, where they are more likely to be a minority. In sum, municipal mergers can be thought of as large-scale reapportionment at the local level, one designed by the Liberal Democratic Party and supported by most other political parties. As a result, politics at local-level should be more consistent with politics at national-level, as politicians and political parties have incentive to cater to urban voters at both levels.

The dissertation workshop features short presentation and lots of time for discussion. Guests are welcome, and if you are a young social scientist in the Tokyo area--any nationality--you are welcome to join (i.e. be on the mailing list) and perhaps present sometime.

John Campbell

*Meetings of the Shaken Social Science Dissertation Workshop start at 12 pm and go to 1:30 and sometimes beyond. The Institute of Social Science provides coffee and tea and you are welcome to bring lunch. The location is a seminar room on the 5th floor in the Akamon General Research (Sougou Kenkyuu) Building.
The building is down a little passage to the right
after you come through Akamon. For a map, go to:

http://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/campusmap/cam01_08_02_e.html
__________________________
>From John Creighton Campbell
Professor Emeritus of Political Science
University of Michigan
Visiting Scholar, Institute of Gerontology Tokyo University jccamp at umich.edu