To John Campbell -- thanks for reminding me of the other articles that discuss
the LDP's move away from an exclusively rural basis. You are correct that they
should be cited more prominently. You are also correct -- as is everyone else
who has made similar points -- that the explanation of policy outcomes and
policy change is complex. Policies are made and remade for lots of reasons that
we cannot capture in simple linear regressions. We try to control for what we
believe to be the most important ones, but we never expect to get them all ;
i,e., we never explain to achieve and R-squared of 1.00 or even .99

I think the point that Campbell made that he and TJ Pempel are interested in
explaining policy, and therefore need more complex stories than are implied by
abstract models is a good point of departure to explain a slight difference in
what a lot of the P-A or "rat-cho" work tries to do. Often, although the prose
surrounding a model may fail to say so, we are more interested in showing that a
particular independent variable matters (hopefully, to a certain extent and in a
certain direction) for any attempt to explain a particular dependent variable.
In other words, when McCubbins and I look for effects of factional change (in
terms of who is in the mainstream at a point in time) on budgetary decisions, we
are not trying to explain why the Japanese government spent what they did on,
say, construction, only that factional politics mattered in a predictable way.

By so doing, we are admittedly taking much smaller steps, and while criticism
for lack of ambition in terms of explanations might be justified (as is, of
course, criticism for failure to cite all the relevant literature) criticisms of
failures to explain the dependent variable thoroughly are not justified, because
that is not what we are trying to do.

A few other points. First, Campbell is again correct that while we often say
things about being willing to consider any types of preferences -- that the
methodology allows for such diversity -- in practice we do not often build such
rich and textured models. Point well taken. And certainly, we should strive for
verisimilitude. On the other hand, precision is easier to come by this way, and
sometimes even the simplest models make quite clear predictions or point out the
flaws in others' predictions. We know that models abstract from reality more
than do more textured accounts of events, and we realize the tradeoff that is
implied by seeking more precision (in terms of logic and hypothesis testing --
not description) and less detail. That's one reason I would never claim that
ours is the only way to study politics. But I think it's a valuable way to do
so.

Second, I thank Pempel and Campbell for elaborating on the work that I referred
to of Pempel's regarding changes that took place in Japanese policy making after
the oil shock. I don't have books in front of me as I'm in Tokyo right now
(which also explains my inability to edit what I'm typing ) but I'll go back and
look for more explicit statements about politicians gaining more power after the
oil shock. I still think that what Pempel wrote in his last post sounds like
that, although I agree that he says a great deal more as well. To say that
decisions became more difficult or policy preferences changed is not to say that
the rules of the game changed, or that resources (meaning policy-making tools)
changed, at least not in the way that I refer to rules and resources. This
brings me to Ellis Krauss's question sbout why we're so hung up on the formal
rules of decision making (I'm paraphrasing). Good question. I think the answer
is that we believe that IF those rules are enforced (which we for some purposes
assume but are willing to investigate explicitly) then those rules are the
starting point for determining who has the authority to make policy decisions.

The distinction between whether politicians became more powerful (had more
authority vis-a-vis bureaucrats) after 1973 and whether and why politicians
began to exercise that authority more visibly or to use certain categories of
that authority (such as the right to reject bur. proposals) more frequently is
NOT a semantic trick. They are two different questions. It is the same as asking
why Ford vetoed so many more bills than Carter. We would claim that all
presidents have the same authority -- Carter could have vetoed everything he saw
-- and ask why it is that Ford chose to use that type of authority more often.
And, in this case, we usually answer something along the lines of "Ford
disagreed with a lot more of what Congress sent him than was true for Carter --
because Ford faced an opposition-controlled Congress." So these two guys - and
all presidents before and since, had the same power or authority . On the other
hand, if a line-item veto were to be added to the constitution, then we would
agree that there has been a shift in authority from the legislative branch to
the executive. So when I say that anyone who claims that politicians became more
powerful (or even more influential) after the oil shock needs to show "what
changed to make that so" I am looking specifically for shifts in policy-making
authority. If Pempel did not make that claim then I apologize and stand
corrected. But I know I've read it and I will let you know. In anycase, the
point here is not about early 1970s Japan -- it's about methods for answering
and asking certain types of political questions.

Given that we usually start with the formal rules of the game, it is not
surprising that most scholarship in the ratcho vein has been applied to stable
democracies, where we believe the rules don't change very often and that the
players know what the rules are. Susan Shirk's recent book on China (called
something like the Political Logic of Economic Reform in China) is a valiant
attempt to apply this methodology to a non-democracy, and it is up to China
scholars to judge whether it helps us to understand what is going on there.
Surprisingly, perhaps, there is still a lot of work to be done explaining the
implications of variations in the formal rules of the political process across
time, place, and issue area. This is what I was trying to get at in answer to
Hiwatari's question about where ratcho or P-A goes from here. Clearly, there is
no substitute for a nuanced understanding of what goes on on the ground in the
places we study. And if we want to explain the Japanese welfare system or energy
policy, that is the only way to go. But if we're interested in getting a handle
on abrupt policy changes, or on different reactions to similar stimuli across
countries (as in the energy field after the oil shock, then I argue we need a
common starting point. And here, generalizable (albeit necessarily
oversimplified) models of how decisions are made can be of great help.

---------------------------------------------------------------- Michael F.
Thies Department of Political Science
(ph) 310-825-1976 UCLA -- Box 951472
(fax) 310-825-0778 405 Hilgard Avenue
thies[atx]nicco.sscnet.ucla.edu Los Angeles, CA 90095-1472
----------------------------------------------------------------