Website Use by Local Assemblies and Civic Engagement: Part II

Relationships between Websites of Local Assemblies and Civic Engagement

Abstract

This paper examines whether good websites of local assemblies affect civic engagement across villages in Japan. Employing our website indexes, which are introduced in Part I, we cluster all 183 village assemblies into 7 groups and compare voter turnouts and sign-up rates of volunteer fire companies across 7 groups. Next, we hypothesize that the effects of websites of local assemblies on voter turnouts vary across its population sizes. The results suggest that the relationship between websites of local assemblies and civic engagement depends on the population sizes and the municipalities. Further research should take this into consideration.