Replication Data for: Boomtown or Bust? Policy Feedback Effects of Divisive Facilities on Social Capital in Japan

When cities agree to build divisive facilities in communities to provide key public goods, do those policy decisions convey unexpected effects on the civic culture of their communities? While planners, residents, and activists have suggested this for years, the literature has not rigorously tested this hypothesis. This mixed methods study introduces a new 37-year panel dataset of indicators of civic culture including voter turnout, crime rates, total migration, and the number of community centers across all 1741 Japanese municipalities. This study uses matching experiments and case studies of 2 nuclear power plant host communities to test whether the policy decision to build nuclear power plants in towns altered their civic culture over time. The result shows that the choice to build a divisive facility nuclear power plants unexpectedly alters the trajectory of a towns' social capital, relative to what they would have experienced otherwise. The findings provide a roadmap for policymakers to plan for and anticipate changes in the social capital of their communities, and demonstrate how policy scholars can further contribute to decisions on which carbon neutral power sources governments should invest in.