[Moderator's Note: The following post is a reply to an August 20 one by
Professor John Campbell.]

In response to John Campbell's comment that money politics is more important and
politically-determinative in the US than in Japan, that is also what I thought
until we finished our research on Comparing Political Networks. In that, to our
surprise, we found that centrality in the "political support" network was more
important in determining (more highly correlated with) reputation for political
influence, than in the US and Germany. Conversely, centrality in the
communication network, which we had expected would be highest in
"consensus-building" Japan, was less correlated with reputation for influence
than in the US or Germany. To the extent that "political support" represents
financial support (and it is at least an analogous kind of scarce resource,
compared to communication-- we could not measure financial transactions
directly), it indicates that money talks louder in Japanese politics than in US
(or German).

What is the explanation of this apparent paradox? It does not refute John's
explanation that Congresspeople in the US have more policy-making power than
Diet representatives. It just casts a wider net. Sure, more "backstage" money
flows to US Congress people than to Diet reps. for the purpose of directly
influencing legislation. And the bureaucrats are less "corrupted" in both
countries, as he notes, making the more-powerful Japanese bureaucrats more
determinative of policy in an uncorrupted way.

But when you begin to count in all the money that moves down the "pipes" to the
political periphery in Japan, the balance changes. It doesn't move that way in
the US. And this money too has to be included when we think of the determination
of policy-outcomes while including all the influential actors, not just the LDP
and the bureaucrats. It buys an enormous amount of political support throughout
the society in innumerable ways. This support has, at least until recently,
given the LDP the capacity to be the final filter on policy-content (and hence
very powerful in its production stages too). This at least would be a
sociological view, since it includes the state-society connection.