Abstract
How does increasing import competition shape domestic politics? Given China’s increasing economic growth and exports, the last several decades have witnessed flourishing debate on how international trade affects domestic politics and local labor markets both in academia and in the realm of policy. This chapter applies the instrumental variable design of Autor et al. (2013) to examine the impacts of the increasing Chinese exports to Japan, including both steel industry-specific increases and increases in all the manufacturing sectors, on the outcomes of Japan’s four national Lower House (Shūgiin) General Elections between 2009 and 2017. Although the present analysis might suffer from several methodological concerns, the estimation results suggest two important patterns. First, naive ordinary least square (OLS) estimates reveal a positive association between import exposure in the steel industry and the vote shares of the ruling coalition and the Liberal Democratic Party. Second, and in contrast to the naive OLS estimates, the positive association becomes invisible once instrumented by Chinese exports to other OECD countries. While the naive comparisons are consistent with popular accounts and suggest evidence of rightward ideological shifts within heavily exposed prefectures, the detected association may not reflect an underlying causality.
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Notes
- 1.
Available at http://www.cepii.fr/CEPII/en/bdd_modele/bdd_modele.asp. Accessed February 2, 2021.
- 2.
Available at https://www.soumu.go.jp/senkyo/senkyo_s/data/shugiin/ichiran.html. Accessed February 2, 2021. The electoral system of the Lower House of Japan comprises single-seat constituencies and proportionally represented multiple-seat constituencies. The vote count records for individual constituencies have been publicly available since the 2009 general elections.
- 3.
Another reason for this focus on the prefecture level is the availability of the covariates and variables used to compute the trade exposure measure and the instrument specified below. Several key sources of these variables are only available at the prefecture level.
- 4.
Available at https://www.soumu.go.jp/toukei_toukatsu/index/seido/sangyo/index.htm and https://unstats.un.org/unsd/classifications/Econ. Accessed February 3, 2021. The correspondence table for the different ISIC versions (Revisions 3, 3.1, and 4) is also provided by the UN Statistics Division.
- 5.
Available at https://wits.worldbank.org/product_concordance.html. Accessed February 3, 2021.
- 6.
The 2012 general election was the first Lower House election after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, which is one of the strongest earthquakes in the recorded history in Japan.
- 7.
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Ito, G. (2021). On the Electoral Consequences of Increasing Chinese Imports: Insights from the Japanese Lower House General Elections, 2009–2017. In: Ma, J., Yamamoto, M. (eds) Growth Mechanisms and Sustainability. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2486-5_11
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