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Abstract
This study investigates the impact of the accumulation of gender representation during the policy implementation stage on the childcare supply expansion. Previous studies faced two key issues: first, they primarily focused on the impact of gender representation during the policy introduction stage, and second, they often lacked sensitivity in distinguishing whether the outcome was driven by partisanship or gender. Using the city-level dataset from western Germany, this study argues that although the effect of female mayors is model dependent, a 10 percentage point increase in the average share of women city councils leads to an increase in the childcare expansion by about 2.5 percentage points. Notably, regardless of left-wing/right-wing positions, women councilors expanded the childcare supply.

recenzja

AbstractIntroThis article examines whether descriptive norms affect voters' intention to vote in national elections in Japan and whether the impact of descriptive norms is moderated by the anticipated level of electoral competition. Social psychological research suggests that one's chance of voting is higher if they learn that many others are voting. On the other hand, knowing many others vote could make one think that their vote is not needed for influencing the election outcome, leading them to abstain.MethodTo test these competing expectations, I conducted a survey experiment in Japan in June 2022, presenting a hypothetical condition of the Lower House election and asking the respondents' intention to vote in the hypothetical contest. I used a 2 × 2 design that varied (1) anticipated voter turnout (high turnout, low turnout) and (2) anticipated level of competition (high competition, low competition).ResultsI find that the descriptive norm of high voter turnout is positively associated with the chance of voting only when the expected level of competition is high.ConclusionThese are not consistent with the prior research demonstrating the strong influence of descriptive norms and the ones finding that the descriptive norm of nonparticipation leads to greater willingness to participate by generating the sense of threat.

AbstractBuilding on the Hodgson–Mokyr debate in this journal (Volume 18, Issue 1, 2022), this article discusses how modern economic growth occurred in pre-Industrial Revolution Britain, with a particular focus on coalition politics and the marginalization of conservative political groups – vetoers to change. Such political marginalization was unusual before the 19th century, when monarchs had substantial political power and land-based conservative groups were their main political allies. This article finds the source of the English exceptionalism in the unique system of non-imperial personal union that Britain then had with the Dutch Republic and Hanover. Under this system, foreigner monarchs chose their local ally in Britain based on the security needs of their home states. It created a significant disadvantage to the Tories, the incumbent conservative groups, while providing a window of opportunity for the Whigs, the opposition group supported by new commercial interests, to form a coalition with the Crown. The long absence of the Tories from power resulted in the incorporation of their constituencies into the Whig-led regime, making the traditional economic interests the regime's 'junior partners', instead of formidable political competitors to the new commercial interests, which was the case before and elsewhere at that time.

Abstract
This essay articulates how feminist, queer, and trans politics in the early aughts have become a precondition for the rise of feminist transphobia in Japan now. On the one hand, mainstream feminists in that period overlooked transphobia in the gender backlash from moral conservatives. On the other hand, a 2003 law on gender recognition for people with GID (gender identity disorder) endorsed the patriarchal system in which only some transsexual people would be recognized. The author argues that these backgrounds allow "gender critical" feminists to oppose what they see as the transgender ideology, forging an implicit alliance with moral conservatives while portraying themselves as being tolerant of people with GID.

AbstractThe number of suicides in Japan increased for the first time in 11 years during the COVID‐19 pandemic. This trend is particularly high among employed women and students. The Japanese government expanded its budget for providing telephone and social network service (SNS) counseling by prefectures and non‐profit organizations (NPOs). On the basis of interviews with the chairman as well as counselors of an NPO in Osaka (Japan) that has provided telephone counseling services on suicide for over 40 years, this study examines suicide and suicide prevention amid the COVID‐19 pandemic with a particular focus on how suicidal feelings are accepted. The results clarify that people do not wish to die just because of financial troubles or health problems; rather, they have lost the meaning in their life in the conflicts between social conditions and their personal life histories. Additionally, as volunteer counselors often experience the suicide of close relatives, their empathy for a caller may be based on their experiences of being overwhelmed by the realization of the otherness of others. They do not regard the acceptance of suicidal feelings as a "job," but act as "friends." Although modern society conceals death and suicide cases, the key to achieving a society where no one is driven into committing suicide is to place human life and human rights first as well as to talk about suicide and suicidal feelings without making the subject taboo or an aberration.

This study examines how shelter workers who serve formerly homeless veterans perceive their experiences and performances related to their workplace. Previous research shows that perceived social support is strongly related to self-efficacy, work morale, and job satisfaction among workers. Interviews administered to homeless shelter workers reveal how they engage in daily tasks and recognize support systems at work. Results show that homeless shelter workers experience positive outcomes associated with their profession while they feel significant challenges and confrontations posed by clients. Acknowledging the critical role of the homeless shelter workforce in addressing veteran homelessness, this study emphasizes the importance of offering effective staff trainings. To support the homeless shelter workforce and develop its capacity, organizational effort should focus on promoting social support and protecting staff well-being.

AbstractNineteenth-century Japan remains a void in the literature on institutions and growth. Developmental institutions evolved in Japan after the Meiji Restoration despite the absence of political participation. Authoritarian change agents usually face a trade-off between reform and stability: they have coercive power to remove underproductive institutions, but at the risk of inviting instability, as politically influential deprivileged elites may engage in counteraction to recover what they perceive as their entitlement. Many authoritarian regimes, thus, coopt elites by allowing them access to rent, but such buying-off inevitably compromises institutional improvement. How did Meiji Japan overcome this dilemma and liberate major fiscal and administrative spaces for productive players who generate wealth and increase the size of the economic pie for society? This article presents a model that it calls 'elite redeployment' to answer this puzzle. In lieu of elite bargains in participatory polities in Europe, the revolutionary authoritarian regime in Japan coercively deprivileged traditional elites and redeployed those with financial or human capital among them in productive institutions. By doing so, the Japanese authoritarian change agents dismantled the incumbent institutions in an irreversible manner and swiftly built new institutions such as modern administrative, educational, financial, and commercial sectors, while maintaining stability.

In 2020, Japan suddenly changed course and made carbon neutrality its intermediate target. In an attempt to understand this drastic policy change, this article analyzes the effects of climate security discourses on the perception of the Japanese business community, which holds the pivotal position in Japan's climate policy. It particularly focuses on the effect of securitization on the source–impact asymmetry, one of the intrinsic features identified as a major obstacle to effective climate governance. From this standpoint, the article measures the extent to which the issue of climate change has been securitized in Japan, and also the extent to which the Japanese business community has come to share the securitizers' sense of exigency. In so doing, this article employs the text-mining method called KH Coder to analyze relevant government documents as well as statements issued by Keidanren (also known as Japan Business Federation). The analysis shows that the Ministry of the Environment together with other governmental actors has collectively securitized the issue within the context of Japanese society, but that its impact on industry has been indirect, pointing to the complexity of its causal impact.

The impact of imperialism on long-term development in the non-Western world was once a popular agenda of inquiry. After the modernization paradigm turned into despair for postcolonial economies, the notions of informal empire (Gallagher and Robinson, 1953) and dependency (Prebisch, 1950; Frank, 1967; Cardoso and Faletto, 1979) marked economists' discussions on underdevelopment in the non-Western world. The agenda, however, lost its momentum after the 1970s, when some Latin American and East Asian economies began growing and research interests and policy agendas shifted from blaming external constraints to identifying internal enablers (Haggard, 1990, 2018). The externalist scholarship became almost moribund thereafter, although its leitmotif was taken over by some Marxian scholarship such as the world-systems theory (Wallerstein, 1974) and its structuralist and anti-globalization offshoots – also partly reincarnated in the literature on the resource curse (Auty, 1993; Karl, 1997).