The Politics of Taxation and Redistributive Equality: Japan in Comparative Perspective

In a comparative array of welfare states, Japan is a critical case. The development of a welfare state and the resistance to welfare retrenchment are path-dependent upon the expansion of the state’s funding capacity. To achieve redistributive equality, contemporary welfare states rely on revenue from regressive taxation in addition to revenue from progressive taxation. The politics of taxation and redistribution explain this unexpected consequence among long-time democracies. It also explains the smaller size of welfare states among young democracies, i.e., those democratized since the 1970s. Building on the comparative implications, the difficulty of a tax increase in Japan's welfare state is reexamined.

Junko Kato (Ph.D., Yale University) is Professor of Political Science at the University of Tokyo. She has conducted research in comparative politics on taxation and the welfare state, party coalitions and government formation, and neuro-cognitive analyses of social decision and behavior. She has authored articles in American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, Electoral Studies, Governance and so on. She has authored two books: The Problem of Bureaucratic Rationality (Princeton University Press, 1994) and Regressive Taxation and the Welfare State (Cambridge University Press, 2003) in addition to numerous book chapters. She was a co-editor-in-chief of Japanese Journal of Political Science (2019~2023) and worked as a member of the Editorial Board of journals including British Journal of Political Science (1996~2016), Perspectives on Public Management and Governance (2016~), and Journal of East Asian Studies (2021~). She has launched neuro-cognitive approaches to social sciences and published articles on fMRI experiments of human decision and behavior in Frontiers in Neuroscience, Scientific Reports, and Cerebral Cortex.