Principal Investigator: TOGAWA Kazunari (Lecturer, Faculty of Policy and Information Studies)
Co-researcher: Satoshi Fuchimoto (Associate Professor Faculty of Policy and Information Studies)

1. Overview of research results
This year, first, I conducted a literature review of community policy from an economic sociological perspective. In particular, I drew on sociological models of urban social relations based on the principle of similarity and the principle of dissimilarity to derive hypotheses about the mechanisms by which social capital, as a private good or club good, unintentionally exerts a negative impact on society as an externality of social capital. Second, I held a workshop as an outreach project and invited Jun Usami (part-time lecturer at the Hosei University Graduate Graduate School of Policy Studies, Doctoral Program Institute) to give a lecture entitled "The Role of Local Government Officials in Community Governance: The Community Officer System as a 'Community-Based Civil Servant.'" This enabled me to gain an understanding of cases in which community policy functions (or fails) due to social capital functioning as a collective good. Third, based on the above research findings, in order to verify the externalities (positive or negative) that social capital exerts on community policy has on society, we obtained quantitative analysis data on 1,500 people living in the Tokyo metropolitan area (Tokyo, Ibaraki, Chiba, Saitama, and Kanagawa) from the "Survey on Citizen Trust, Social Participation, and Lifestyle Policies that Shape the Community," as shown in the table. This made it possible to derive a regression equation for estimating the impact of local social capital that determines whether a city has adopted the local officer system or not.

2. Books, papers, academic presentations, etc.
[Paper (peer-reviewed)]
Kazunari Togawa (2024), "Does social capital promote understanding of social changes due to increasing international migration?—An empirical study on the social integration of international migrants based on a survey of one metropolitan area and four prefectures in the Tokyo metropolitan area," Annual Report of the Economic and Social Science Association, peer-reviewed, accepted for publication (currently under revision).
[Books and papers (not peer reviewed)]
Togawa, Kazunari (2024), "Does social capital function as a place for multigenerational residents to live healthily? Focusing on Shimada City, Shizuoka Prefecture, and its Kanaya district," Chiba University of Commerce Review, Vol. 61, No. 3, pp. 153-165.
[Conference presentations, etc.]
Kazunari Togawa(2024). Effects of Relative Power on Civil Society Development, Chair: Naoto Yamauchi, B01 Global Dynamics of Civil Society and Democracy in Japan and Asia, Panel Session, June 2024 at the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action, 8th Annual ARNOVA-Asia Conference, Seoul, South Korea, Yonsei University, Accepted.

 

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