To respond to Prof. Lehmbruch's call for comparative work, and Prof. Michael Thies' seconding of that, I should report that our team has recently completed such a project, and the book should be out this fall. The citation is: David Knoke, Franz Pappi, Jeffrey Broadbent and Yutaka Tsujinaka, Comparing Policy Networks: the Politics of Labor Policy Formation in the US, Germany and Japan (Cambridge, forthcoming). Our three "teams" (Knoke for US, Pappi for Germany and Broadbent-Tsujinaka for Japan) conducted exactly comparable surveys of organizations involved in labor policy politics in each country (115-130 organizations in each country, 25-35 policy events in each country) and asked them about their exchange of information, political support and other resources with the other actors in their nation, plus considerable other information. The organizations included a variety of government ministries (and a number of bureaux within them), political parties, labor and business groups, advisory councils, public interest groups, and others. Using network analysis techniques on this data, we were able to identify a number of very important differences in relative centralization, corporatism, role of the state and so forth among the three countries. On most measures, Japan was at one extreme, the US at the other, and Germany in between. We have published one comparative paper using this data, on the "issue publics" in the three nations ("Issue Publics in the American, German and Japanese National Labor Policy Domains," in Research in Politics and Society, edited by Gwen Moore and J. Allen Whitt, Greenwich, CT:
JAI Press.) I am working on a fuller analysis of the four networks in Japan and their relationship to perceived organizational influence and self-assessed policy goal success, with background comparison to the other two countries.
Network analysis as a formal methodology is relatively new, and this is the first effort in a tri-country political comparative vein.