2025 Volume 7 Pages 36-57
This paper investigates references to Keynes and Keynesianism in Britain’s Hansard and Japan’s National Diet records over nearly eight decades. Using both simplified and corpus-based searches, it identifies peaks in parliamentary discourse while exposing linguistic and institutional obstacles to measurement. In Britain, references spiked in the 1940s, resurged in the late 1970s and 1980s, and declined sharply after 2015. Japan shows major waves in the 1980s and 1990s, followed by a similar fall. Long-run correlations between the two countries are weak, but rolling-window analyses reveal short periods of strong convergence. The results highlight not only the methodological limits of frequency analysis but also a puzzle for future research―the rapid disappearance of Keynesian references after 2015―while confirming that Keynesian thought has persisted over the long term as a living element of parliamentary economic discourse.
