Characteristics and Changes in Japanese Public Administration Research: Statistical Content Analyses of Article Titles in Public Administration Review Quarterly(1978–2019)

Abstract

Abstract The objective of this study is to understand features of Japan’s public administration research and the changes it has undergone by using statistical content analyses. To this end, this study quantitatively explains research trends in postwar administrative studies in Japan by statistically analyzing article titles from the Public Administration Review Quarterly over the course of nearly 40 years. Co-occurrence network and correspondence analyzes revealed the changes in research interests. There was substantially more research on administrative reforms through the postwar Showa and Heisei eras. The configuration of the correspondence analysis indicates that the first dimension is concerned with administrative reforms, the second with historical events or administrative systems, and the third with evaluations and kaizen (improvement). Co-occurrence network analysis showed that two extracted compound words, the United States and the United Kingdom, were very common in studies during the Showa era (1978–1988). This suggests that Japan’s public administration was strongly influenced by the Western world during this period. Japan’s own policies and institutions became a feature of these studies during the Heisei era (1989–2018). Compared with the results of the analysis of the author’s previous studies on another Japanese administrative studies journal, there are both parts of the results that are similar. One commonality of the results of the analysis is that the dimension related to administrative reform was found in the correspondence analysis. In the present study, the first principal component was administrative reform, and Moteki’s (2020) correspondence analysis also found “reform,” “policy evaluation” and “governance” as characteristic extracted terms related to the 2000s. After World War II, Japanese public administration studies were strongly influenced by their American counterparts, which confirmed the managerial approach in the form of the rise of research on administrative reform. In this connection, the configuration figure of the second and third dimensions of the correspondence analysis in this study reveals “policy evaluation” and “improvement” (kaizen). This quantitative analysis also confirmed changes in the characteristics of Japanese public administration. Featured words like governance, local government, and policy evaluation in the figure of the Heisei era reaffirmed the changes in the direction of administrative studies.