Ideational Analysis of Decentralization in Developed Demcoracies

2015 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 26885038
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Research Activity Start-up
• Allocation Type: Single-year Grants
• Research Field: Politics
• Research Institution: Kyoto University
• Principal Investigator: Hijino Ken 京都大学, 法学(政治学)研究科(研究院), 准教授 (90738311)
• Project Period (FY): 2014-08-29 – 2016-03-31
• Keywords: Discourse / Decentralization / Party Politics / Ideology / Regional Inequality

Outline of Final Research Achievements

The research seeks to investigate the role of ideas on political decentralization and responses to growing regional inequalities among political parties within Japan, UK, and Sweden.

Despite expectations that social democratic and communist parties would generally oppose, while conservative parties favour the idea of decentralization and be more willing to accept regional inequalities, members of these party families in the countries investigated have not necessarily been committed to such positions over time. In recent years we have seen convergence in the discourse, particularly among the major parties on the left and right, over the goal and merits of decentralization. Mainstream parties have also largely been hostile to growing regional inequality. The three cases suggest that despite differing institutional contexts, two ideas (neo-liberalism and regionalism) have a strong impact on the parties’ discursive and policy positions on both decentralization and regional inequality.

Free Research Field

Political Science