Municipal merger and local democracy: An assessment of the merger of Japanese municipalities

Municipal mergers have been widely used as a tool for administrative reform. While mergers have been planned or implemented with the hope of increasing efficiencies in service provisions, their impacts on local democracy have been neglected. 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 influence legislative performance. After controlling for potential confounding factors, the analysis shows that municipal merger is negatively correlated to legislative performance.