After more than a century of political parties in continental Europe, the United Kingdom, Japan, the United States and other countries, and changing roles of parties within the political systems/constitutions as a whole, there seems little reason to uphold any particular phase of political development in any of these and other countries as an *a priori* model for parliamentary democracy. Comparing post-war United States, Britain, France and Germany, for instance, I could not easily uphold any particular country as a model for parliamentary democracy.

(personal comment: I still remember very vividly that as a youngster growing up in West Germany virtually all our high school history teachers argued that a proper functioning of parliamentary democracy also required an active role for a viable trade union movement ...)

There are no ideal type utopia guiding us as beacons; nor has anyone ever been able to come up with a universally valid description of the ideal institutional form for a parliamentary democracy + "market economy". It is therefore not very productive to judge current political developments against a normative ideal-type, neither with regard to politicians/political parties as such, or their constitutional/de facto role in any particular country.

It is much more imperative to develop descriptive methods that tell us how to interpret current developments in the light of the fact that amorphous opinion
"groups", institutionalized groups (e.g., parties), and the distribution of (political, economic, including social welfare) tasks carried out by various institutions (bureaucracy, parties, banks, enterprises) are patterned differently in each country.

Not the form and pattern of these activities, but the de facto ability of any individual to co-determine his own life, and thus exercise his individual sovereignty, in a given society should give us an indication of the democratic character of that society. We cannot judge current political developments by creating artificial benchmarks which themselves are a normative expression of where the formal development of parliamentary democracy should go.

National traditions play an important role. In Japan, institutional organizations and opinion groups tend to coincide much less than in other countries, so the bartering that precedes policy making cuts across (institutionalized) groups much more easily than in some other societies.
Intrinsically there seems nothing wrong with such a "deviant" pattern. It's a different way of policy making, but is it less democratic, or less rational than the fairly complex patterns of policy making that are now developing within the European Union?"