市民社会の変容に関する国際比較研究: 追い越す韓国、堅実に増加する日本、緩やかに衰退する米国

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the scale of civil society organizations in Korea, Japan, and the United States over time and to discuss the nature of changes in civil society in the three countries before and after the 2000s. To achieve this, the study utilizes the Establishment and Enterprise statistics conducted annually in each country to analyze the trends in the number of organizations and the number of employees in these organizations from the 1950s to the 2020s. The structure of this paper is as follows: Chapter 1 discusses the significance and methodology of comparing civil societies across the three countries. Chapter 2 analyzes and describes the results of a comparative study of the number of organizations and their employees per 100,000 population using the Establishment and Enterprise statistics. Chapter 3 examines the characteristics of changes in civil society organizations in Korea, Japan, and the United States, focusing on institutional variables as the underlying factors. Chapter 4 presents the findings of a comparative analysis of the three countries’ civil societies, revealing that South Korea shows a rapid surge, Japan experiences steady growth, and the United States is gradually declining. Specifically, in Japan economic organizations remain robust and show an increasing trend, while in Korea, citizen and other organizations have grown dramatically. In the case of the United States, it has been confirmed that there is a notable declining trend in labor organizations. Regarding the number of employees, Japan and Korea are quantitatively approaching the United States, indicating similar trends among the three countries. This suggests that Japan and Korea are gradually aligning with the conditions of civil society assumed by the liberal democratic system in the United States.