Does citizen participation affect municipal performance? Electoral competition and fiscal performance in Japan

ABSTRACT

Subnational fiscal performance has been receiving a lot of attention from researchers in various disciplines. However, there is very little published on the impact of citizen involvement on fiscal performance. This paper shows that a lack of citizen involvement in the electoral process was associated with fiscal performance in all 807 city-level Japanese municipalities from 2006 to 2012.

KEYWORDS:

• Electoral competition
• fiscal performance
• Japan
• municipality

ORCID

Kohei Suzuki http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5403-4826