Legitimation of Income Inequality in Japan: A Comparison with South Korea and the United States

This paper was submitted to the Research Network Q “Asian Capitalisms” of the 2019 SASE annual conference in New York and won the 2019 FFJ/SASE Award for the Best Paper on Asia. This research was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP16H03688.Why does Japan have a large earnings gap between regular and non-regular employment? We attempt to answer this question through the lens of the legitimation of inequality, assuming the possibility that the inequality remains unresolved because it is legitimized due to institutional settings in Japanese society. In this paper, we explore to what extent the inequality is legitimized, as well as how it is legitimized, in Japanese society by analyzing data collected from a comparative vignette survey on the just income of fictitious workers in comparison with South Korea and the United States. The results of multilevel model analysis show that the income gap between regular and non-regular employees is accepted as just in Japan and South Korea. Moreover, non-regular worker respondents think that the income gap should be wider than regular worker respondents do (against their own interests) only in Japan. To some extent, the acceptance of income inequality and its over-acceptance by non-regular workers can be explained by the assumed difference in the duties and opportunities in the workplace between regular and non-regular employees, which is brought about by the male breadwinner model and Japanese firms’ practices to secure the livelihood of employees and their families. Based on the results, we argue that the income inequality between regular and non-regular employment in Japan has a stronger logic of legitimation and, therefore, is more likely to persist than in other countries

Anti-immigration attitudes in different welfare states: Do types of labor market policies matter?

Abstract This research sheds light onto the effects of welfare policies on anti-immigration attitudes by focusing on qualitative differences in these policies over time. Previous studies provide little evidence that welfare policies affect levels of anti-immigration attitudes because they view the welfare state in an overly abstract manner in relation to attitudes toward immigration. From this viewpoint, this research focuses on differences in a specific aspect of welfare policies, i.e. labor market policies, according to level and type of activation. By analyzing cross-national data over time, we determine that labor market policies in the form of activation policies indeed affect attitudes toward immigration. We also show that the effects vary across different types of labor market policies and depend on individual levels of socioeconomic vulnerability. Thus, this article provides a first step to rethinking how we conceptualize the welfare state in relation to anti-immigrant attitudes

Legitimation of Income Inequality in Japan: A Comparison with South Korea and the United States

This paper was submitted to the Research Network Q “Asian Capitalisms” of the 2019 SASE annual conference in New York and won the 2019 FFJ/SASE Award for the Best Paper on Asia. This research was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP16H03688.Why does Japan have a large earnings gap between regular and non-regular employment? We attempt to answer this question through the lens of the legitimation of inequality, assuming the possibility that the inequality remains unresolved because it is legitimized due to institutional settings in Japanese society. In this paper, we explore to what extent the inequality is legitimized, as well as how it is legitimized, in Japanese society by analyzing data collected from a comparative vignette survey on the just income of fictitious workers in comparison with South Korea and the United States. The results of multilevel model analysis show that the income gap between regular and non-regular employees is accepted as just in Japan and South Korea. Moreover, non-regular worker respondents think that the income gap should be wider than regular worker respondents do (against their own interests) only in Japan. To some extent, the acceptance of income inequality and its over-acceptance by non-regular workers can be explained by the assumed difference in the duties and opportunities in the workplace between regular and non-regular employees, which is brought about by the male breadwinner model and Japanese firms’ practices to secure the livelihood of employees and their families. Based on the results, we argue that the income inequality between regular and non-regular employment in Japan has a stronger logic of legitimation and, therefore, is more likely to persist than in other countries