Dear SSJ-Forum members:

Postings subsequent to my last one have raised a large number of questions I would like to address, but let me limit myself to two issues raised by Stephen Frank and David Leheny.

First, I liked the way Stephen Frank suggests that politicians are motivated to intervene sometimes by "ideology" and sometimes by material interests and that different issue areas may be characterized by different patterns. If so, it may be that the rational choice approach, with its primary focus on material interests (e.g. in Ramseyer and Rosenbluth) can tell us about the patterns on only some of the issues. At the root of this approach is the assumption that politicians are motivated exclusively by their desire to get reelected and that voters are motivated (in their boundedly rational way) by their desire to maximize their welfare--generally expressed in terms of maximizing local pork and the rents they earn from government regulations. This may be a fair way to characterize the politics of many issues in Japan and elsewhere, but perhaps not in areas where the main policy issues concern non-material goals. Frank suggests that education may be one of these issues given the long history of ideological battles over whether education should be directed toward training good and obedient worker/citizens (the view of the right) or toward training peace-loving and well-rounded individuals (the view of the left?). I agree that ideology motivated LDP activism in the area of education, especially in the first two postwar decades, and to account for this we clearly need a model which can accomodate _ideological interests_ as well as material interests as the driving force of the process.

I underline _ideological interests_ above because I think it is important to recognize that what Frank is talking about here is a little different from what I and others have meant when talking about the influence of "ideas" on the policy process. Ideas often have to do with beliefs about how best to pursue a given material interest. Voters and politicians want a high growth / low unemployment economy but it is unclear what policies are most likely to deliver this result. When Keynesian economics was accepted by policy elite around the world starting with the Great Depression, it shaped the way voters and politicians sought to pursue their goals. These ideas influenced policy not by reshaping interests but by reshaping the way actors evaluated policy alternatives in terms of their ability to achieve this end. In the process, these ideas reshaped institutions too in such a way as to have a prolonged impact on policy. Peter Hall writes about the impact of Keynesian ideas. Judith Goldstein does something similar on the impact of ideas about trade policy.

This brings me back to the "complexity" I was talking about in the land policy case I alluded to in an earlier post--and to David Leheny's question about how complexity is related to the influence of ideas. What made it possible for ideas to make a difference in this case--despite the large material interests at stake for almost all Japanese voters!--was the fact that policymakers were not sure what was causing the land price problem and how best to stop the spiral. The economics was too complicated for the policy experts, much less the general public. Under these conditions, when one perspective on the debate about what is causing the problem and how to deal with it become predominant, this shift in ideas altered policy outcomes. The reason so much of the literature on epistemic communities deals with the environment is because many of these issues are characterized by scientific complexity which, much as in the land policy case, makes it difficult for elites and the public to sort out which policies would be best for them. In the case of issues like these, ideas can make a difference.

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