I found the summary of Masaru Kohno's recent talk interesting and wanted to address his defense of R/R [i.e., Professors Ramseyer and Rosenbluth's _Japan's Political Marketplace_] on the grounds that politician dominance is for them just an assumption and not a conclusion. On this grounds, Kohno finds Johnson and Keehn's criticism missing their mark.

I disagree that politician dominance is for R/R just an assumption. At the end of Chapter 7, in a section labeled "conclusion" and following a chapter in which empirical material has been analyzed, R/R find that "upon reflection, perhaps we have taken Japanese bureaucrats a bit too seriously. LDP leaders do use them, and use them successfully. By all odds, they do accomplish well that which those leaders care most about." This sounds like a conclusion to me, and on those grounds it would seem fair for J/K to take issue with it based on their own reading of empirical events in Japanese politics.

The problem with evaluating R/R claims of politician domiance is that their presentation of the politician's incentives allow _any_ policy outcome to be described as a reflection of the LDP's interests. R/R differentiate between the incentives facing LDP backbenchers and those facing LDP leaders. Backbenchers, because of the electoral system, faced incentives to procure pork and other particularistic policies for their constituents. Leaders, on the other hand, faced incentives to rein in particularistic excess because taken too far, such policies (because they require higher taxes and economic inefficiencies) would cost the party its hold on power. Having specified the incentives facing these parts of the LDP in this way, R/R go on to treat evidence of particularistic policy as a reflection of LDP influence because that shows the backbenchers are influencing policy while at the same time treating cases in which particularism is reined in (e.g. MOF's fiscal rehabilitation effort) as a reflection of LDP influence because that shows LDP leaders were influencing policy. Because anything that happended was allowed to happen by the LDP, it must reflect the LDP's incentives one way or another.

The interesting question, to me, is not whether the bureaucrats or politicians dominate policymaking. On most issues, there are bureaucrats and politicians on both sides of the issue, so that it is literally impossible to determine which one (sic) is in charge. Rather, I propose, we should be asking _when_ the advocates of particularistic policy (party backbenchers and spending bureaucrats?) dominate policy and _when_ advocates of reining in particularism (MOF and party leaders?) dominate. That, anyway, is the direction in which my research is going, and I hope when I get there that I find some of you interested in similar questions.

Len Schoppa
ljs2k[atx]virginia.edu
Department of Government & Foreign Affairs 232 Cabell Hall; University of Virginia; Charlottesville, VA 22901 (804) 924-3211 Fax (804) 924-3359