Journal ArticleDOI
Bureaucrats and Politicians in Policymaking: The Case of Japan
Michio Muramatsu,Ellis S. Krauss +1 more
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TLDR
This paper conducted a survey of 251 higher civil servants and 101 members of the government and opposition parties in the House of Representatives in Japan, supplemented by data from other surveys and, wherever possible, compared to equivalent data from western democracies.Abstract:
This article extends the recent empirical work on the perceptions and role of bureaucrats and politicians in policymaking. The question of the relationship between politicians and bureaucrats and the role of each in policymaking is especially important in the case of Japan, because the prevalent models of Japanese politics and policymaking are those of the “bureaucracy dominant” or of a closely interwoven “ruling triad” of bureaucracy, big business, and the governing Liberal Democratic Party.Data are from a systematic survey of 251 higher civil servants and 101 members of the government and opposition parties in the House of Representatives, supplemented by data from other surveys and, wherever possible, compared to equivalent data from western democracies.The results indicate that Japanese politicians and bureaucrats resemble Western European elites both in social background and in the fact that although the roles of politician and bureaucrat are converging, there are still differences in their contributions to the policymaking process. However, politicians influence policymaking more than most models of Japanese politics have posited, and even government and opposition politicians share some consensus about the most important policy issues facing Japan. A factor analysis demonstrated that higher civil servants' orientations toward their roles vary significantly with their positions in the administrative hierarchy.The 27-year incumbency of the LDP as ruling party has been particularly important in determining the Japanese variant of the relationship between politicians and bureaucrats. We suggest that the Japanese case shows that the bureaucracy's increasing role in policymaking is universal; however, in late-modernizing political systems like Japan's, where the bureaucracy has always been a dominant actor, the growing power of politicians in postwar politics has been the most significant actor in bringing about more convergence in the two elites. Our data on this trend argue for a more complicated and pluralistic view of Japanese policymaking than that provided by either the bureaucracy-dominant or the ruling-triad model.read more
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Journal ArticleDOI
Bringing politics back in: Towards a model of the developmental state
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors suggest that the few cases of rapid economic growth in the Third World in the last 30 years have occurred in democratic, quasi-democratic and non-democratic polities.
Journal ArticleDOI
Governance, the State and the Politics of Development
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that development is fundamentally a political matter and that it is illusory to conceive of good governance as independent of the forms of politics and type of state which alone can generate, sustain and protect it.
Journal ArticleDOI
Institutions and growth in East Asia
TL;DR: A review of these institutional explanations finds that few if any of the postulated institutional explanations involve either necessary or sufficient conditions for rapid growth as mentioned in this paper, suggesting that institutions are themselves endogenous to other political factors that appear more consequential for growth, including particularly the nature of the relationship between the state and the private sector.
Book ChapterDOI
The Japanese Colonial Empire:1895-1945
TL;DR: Chen et al. as discussed by the authors provided a comprehensive view of the Japanese empire from its establishment in 1895 to its liquidation in 1945, focusing on the origin and evolution of the formal empire, institutions and policies by which it was governed, and the economic dynamics that impelled it.
Journal ArticleDOI
Explaining Party Adaptation to Electoral Reform: The Discreet Charm of the LDP?
Ellis S. Krauss,Robert Pekkanen +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the effects of Japan's 1994 electoral reform on Japan's governing party, the LDP, have been investigated and a central theme is unpredicted organizational adaptation.
References
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Book
MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925-1975
TL;DR: A Japanese'miracle' as mentioned in this paper, the rise of industrial policy and the institutions of high-speed growth, is a classic example of a Japanese model, which is also related to ours.
Book
The Bureaucratic Phenomenon
TL;DR: The Bureaucratic Phenomenon of Decision-making in large organizations and the cultural analysis of social patterns of action is discussed in this paper, where Crozier argues that the role of various bureaucratic systems appears to depend on the pattern of power relation-ships between groups and individuals.
Journal ArticleDOI
Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives.
Journal ArticleDOI
Bureaucrats and Politicians in Western Democracies.
Lewis J. Edinger,Joel D. Aberbach,Robert D. Putnam,Bert A. Rockman,Samuel J. Eldersveld,Ronald Inglehart +5 more
TL;DR: The authors conducted a comprehensive comparison of these two powerful elites in seven countries (the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, Italy, and the Netherlands) to understand how their aims, attitudes, and ambitions differ within cultural settings.