Jedediah Pida-Reese

Imperial Japan, Civilian Control, and Democratic Reversal

Public Choice

This paper investigates why Imperial Japan’s promising Taishō-era democracy (1905–32) experienced a gradual descent into militarism that culminated in the collapse of party government and the effective subordination of civilian authority to the military by the late 1930s. Building on North et al.’s (2009) framework, I argue that this democratic reversal was driven by a failure to consolidate civilian control over the instruments of violence. Facing the existential threat of Russian expansion, civilian elites made a deliberate decision to empower the military at a moment when civilian institutional control over the armed forces was weak and the military technology being adopted concentrated coercive power in a professional officer corps insulated from civilian oversight. This combination produced a substantial probability of eventual military takeover, which was realized over the following three decades as each remaining instrument of civilian authority was tested and broken in turn. This trajectory is contrasted with that of Britain, where civilian institutional control over the military had been consolidated two centuries before industrial warfare arrived. Comparable military technologies were later absorbed there into an existing civilian chain of command and kept under civilian direction. I identify a distinct pathway of democratic backsliding and demonstrate that the strength of civilian institutional control and the character of available military technology at the moment of military empowerment are critical determinants of whether democracy endures.

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Did the Plaza Accord Cause Japan’s Real Estate Bubble?

Contemporary Economic Policy

In 1985 the international exchange rate intervention known as the “Plaza Accord” was carried out between the G-5 countries, the US, Japan, Germany, France, and the UK. In this study I employ the synthetic control method to examine if there was a causal effect of the Plaza Accord on residential housing prices in Japan. Following the agreement Japan experienced a bubble in urban real estate and the stock market. I find small and insignificant effects of the Plaza Accord on real housing prices in the several years following it, providing evidence that the Accord did not exacerbate the bubble.

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Crisis, Coordination, and Governance in Post-3.11 Japan

This paper examines how governance worked across time in Japan’s response to the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima nuclear accident — how coordination problems differed between emergency response and long-term reconstruction, and how state and non-state actors shifted roles and responsibilities between those two stages. The goal is not to favor top-down or bottom-up models, but to analyze how both were deployed in different ways across the disaster timeline. Building on Austrian and institutional analyses of disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, the paper applies these frameworks to the Japanese case — a high-capacity, centralized state that nevertheless required significant local improvisation and civic engagement to function across both the relief and recovery periods. It contributes to the broader literature by testing these theories in a contrasting institutional setting: one that is highly planned and hierarchical, yet still reliant on informal networks in times of crisis.

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The Political Coase Theorem and the Peaceful Domain Abolition of 1871 in Meiji Japan

This paper applies the Political Coase Theorem to explain why Japan’s 1871 abolition of the feudal domains (haihan chiken) occurred peacefully despite the central government and local elites both being armed with a large hereditary warrior class. We argue that the Meiji government and the daimyo reached a Coasean bargain that exchanged local sovereignty for credible compensation. Facing mutual fiscal crises, both sides benefited from an agreement in which the state assumed domain debts and granted new nobility status (kazoku titles), stipends, and government offices as institutionalized side payments in exchange for sole ownership over tax collection. These arrangements transformed former rivals into stakeholders and made the new centralized regime self-enforcing. By embedding elite privileges within emerging political institutions, the Japanese case demonstrates how credible commitment can arise through elite status incorporation.

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Feudal Federalism in Tokugawa Japan

This paper studies the relationship between decentralization and the relative success of the Tokugawa bakufu (1603–1868). I argue that market-preserving federalism (MPF), Tokugawa-style, underpinned the country’s success during the period. The bakufu provided national security, foreign affairs, monopoly coinage, national highways, and rule of law, while the more than 260 regional daimyo retained autonomy over local administration, taxation, education, and industrial regulation under hard budget constraints — facing fiscal pressure from sankin kotai obligations and a tax base limited to rice yields (kokudaka). Applying the framework of Weingast (1995) and the federalism conditions of Riker (1964), I argue that this decentralized arrangement preserved markets and incentivized jurisdictional competition, contributing to two and a half centuries of domestic peace alongside the commercial, demographic, and cultural growth that characterized the Edo Period.