I could not agree more with Prof. Schoppa on the way to re-format the bureaucracy-party debate.

Let me outline some ideas of my previous reseach in an attempt to address the question.

(1) Within the bureaucracy, "spending bureaucrats" are checked by their superiors. New projects initiated at the section level are examined/rejected by upper echelons of the bureaucracy who play the role of fiscal conservatives. This bottom-up process is repeated within the ministry, between the ministry and MOF, and within MOF (a process well documented by John Campbell, and one that fits my personal exerience as faculty member negotiating with the Todai [Tokyo University] headquarters and the Ministry of Education.) This dynamic and interchangerable role-taking allows not only bureaucratic spenders to align with zoku-politicians and interest groups to press their superiors, but also the same bureaucrats to align with MOF to check the demands of zoku-politicians and interest groups. Thus, the bureaucracy as a whole has a vested interest in upholding the power of MOF within government to maintain autonomy from zoku-politicians and interest groups (again I think Ito Daiichi should be credited as the originator of this idea )

(2) My reseach on the socio-economic reforms of the 1980s shows that the reason public pension reform, health care reform and tax reform all failed in the 1979-80 and that all of these reforms passed in 1984-85 (in the case of welfare) and 1988-89 (in the case of tax) was because in the former period the proposed revisions were to cut benefits/increase burdens, while in the latter period there was a redistribution of costs and benefits among major interests (in the form of penson unification, cross-subsidization of health care orgagnizations, and packages of tax increase with tax cuts). In this process, political parties showed little interests in designing policies to accomodate conflicting interests such as redistributing costs and benefits, but only opposed the cost increase / benefit cut part of the reforms. And in all the cases, facing pressure from both the opposition and rank and file members, LDP-government leaders ameliorated the cost increase / benefit cut part of the government bill. By initiating such modifications LDP-government leaders were able to pass the bill without rank and file revolt and with the support of moderate parties.

(3) The point to be made is, under this system the core coordination of conflicting interests to forge a broad policy coalition was led by the bureaucracy. All the LDP leaders had to do was to install populist modifications to coopt the opposition and LDP rank-and-file to secure the safe passage of the bills. One may argue, however, the LDP was able the make the bureaucrats in effect coordinate policies to match their interests. One must realize however, the role of politicians was radically different from the cases of Reagan and Thatcher, where politicians initiated policies to directly mobilize electoral support (such as tax cuts, selling of public housing) even at the cost of splitting the electorate. In other words, the role of parties and politicians are sigificantly narrower and limited in Japan, even if they are able to rule because bureaucrats design policies to keep whoever is in power in power.

To me, it would be hard to explain recent reorganizing of political parties had the parties strong ties with social interests (except constituency interests)

PS. Accepting the fact that academic papers are written for the vanity of the author, if anyone is interested in details of the above explanation, please contact SSJ Forum.

Nobuhiro Hiwatari
Cambridge UK.