John Campbell recently wrote:

With regard to the alleged shift
>in the early 1970s, now most everyone seems to agree that politicians became
more influential at least in the sense of articulating goals and getting them
achieved, but that they really did not increase their authority. Some of the
dispute centered on what people mean by "power." We should hear from TJ Pempel
on this point: his first published article was about the concept of power,
written (at cost of great envy among his colleagues) when still a graduate
student at Columbia.

I'm not sure what piece John is referring to: my first published piece was on
the Rise of the Military in Japan and Argentina in the 1930s, and while power
was obviously a concern, I don't think I did much in there at the theoretical
level to clarify the concept. But let me use John's invitation to comment a bit
on the subject.

My central concern on the recent debates has been that it is too glib to treat
the issue of intra-conservative power as a zero sum game between politicians and
bureaucrats. I don't think it has very often, if ever, played out that way.
Clearly, as many have pointed out, institutional position can often (always?)
shape an individual's perceptions of self-interest and hence shape positions on
issues of conflict. But at the same time, the interplay among complex goals and
complex institutional arrangements will work to minimize any simple "politicians
vs. bureaucrat" alignment on any truly complex policy measure. As Tsebelis has
pointed out most political games are complex and "nested" into one another.
My favorite example of this comes from The Last Hurrah--a novel about Boston
politics. A political neophyte is listening to the mayor lament his dilemma
about which particular individual to honor with a statue in a particular town
plaza. Essentially, Irish Catholics wanted a statue of St. Patrick. Women wanted
a statue of Susan B. Anthony. The local monsigneur wanted a statue of himself.
Italians wanted Christopher Columbus. The neophyte asked if the mayor would
simply count up the votes of the various groups and build the statue that was
wanted by the largest number. "Absolutely not" said the mayor. What I'm going to
do is quite a bit more astute. The statue will be of Mother Cabrini. Let any
group tell me it doesn't meet their needs...." (In effect--a female Italian
Catholic saint who was a favorite of the monsigneur).

Ok so what? Well, in real life, political decisions will involve complex goals
and relatively complex solutions. There may be very good reasons for
hypothesizing a single goal for a single institution on a single issue; and then
pitting this against another single goal for another single institution on the
same issue. But I, for one, have rarely been interested in such
approaches--though they have their audiences and fans, and someone like Ron
Rogowski does a terrific job in Commerce and Coalitions with pushing such an
explanation to very insightful conclusions about cross-national economic
behavior.

But when it comes to understanding Japan and Japanese politics in a broad and
complex period such as the 1970s, or on a broad and complex set of issues like
"economic opening" or whatever, I find it more interesting to look for
non-monotonic explanations that are somewhat parsimonious but that do not seek
so much empirical oversimplification as to miss contact with all political
reality. And the dependent variables I have usually sought to work with have
never--to my mind--been as simple as "politician's relative power." (or some
other version of the same sort of thing.)

This is what I fear has been done in both English and in Japanese with the
debates over the alleged power of bureaucrats and politicians. AT one level, I
fully agree that politicians became more active, involved, and influential in a
wide range of policymaking endeavors, particularly in the early 1970s. They did
this for complex reasons linked to socio-demographic shifts; tougher elections;
longer tenure; more policy expertise; changes in the economic incentives of
various socio-economic groups of voters, etc. (These are propositions subject to
debate/falsification/empirical examination--and on which I am perfectly willing
to hold up my evidence against that of others). But beyond such (what I would
consider) reasonably self-evident facts, there is a far more complex reality
accounting for shifts in both the character of public policy and the process of
policy formation. And it has usually been these that I have sought to
understand.

Even more importantly to my thinking is the fact that there are many different
problems to be explained in politics (Japanese or otherwise). Your choice and my
choice of what to explain may be quite different, and may be the outcome of
things as simple as personal preference and curiosity, or as technical as one's
different research techniques and capabilities. But this is not to say that all
decisions about what to examine are relative, and hence equally singificant.
Quite the contrary: there are some "holes in the literature" that to my mind are
perfectly justified by the triviality of the insights that would be gained by
closing them.

How ultimately do we "know" or decide what these are? I don't have a terrific
insight on this--but time is one very good test. If particular explanations keep
resurfacing month after month and year after year as "important" to the work of
others, and to the building of subsequent insights, the piece that is
continually part of the building process seems to be proving its worth.
Conversely as we all know, there are lots of books and articles that have been
published and rarely provide sufficient insight to others as to warrent being
photocopied, read, and referred to, let alone actually "used" to build further
insights.

Clearly a lot of ink is now being spilled on both sides of the Pacific on this
issue of the relative power of bureaucrats and politicians. This in itself,
however, does not "prove" the importance of the issue. It merely suggests that
like a group of six year olds playing soccer, everyone may be chasing the same
ball around the field, trying to kick it once or twice. And wherever the ball
goes, the six year olds will follow. But as any good soccer player can attest,
that is not "good soccer," although it may be great exercise. But in the longer
run, I am convinced we will learn more about Japan, more about Japanese
politics, and more about political science if we choose interesting and complex
problems that have real and empirical roots and outcomes, and hypotheses that
are subjected to the tests of falsifiability. I could be wrong, but so far, it
seems to me the stuff we all draw on for our insights, and the stuff that seems
so far to be standing the test of time, is of that order.

In this regard, only one more point seems particularly salient to me. In much of
the current debate, there is a very pervasive tendency to ignore the complexity
of what someone else may have said, written, or argued on an issue and to reduce
their views to some oversimplified cliche. Just recently, for example, there was
an interesting exchange on DFS about the character of corruption among Japanese
civil servants. Chal Johnson was somehow "accused" of having painted a picture
of the civil service as beyond corruption, etc. etc. and having left us all with
a sense of the typical bureaucrat as "above" doing anything that would
compromise his commitment to the goals of the nation-state etc. etc. Many folks
might somehow associate Chal with such a view, but only if they never really
read what he has written on the subject--as he himself was quick to point out,
chock full of citations to bolster his point.
One of the real dangers I see in the debates over politicians vs. bureaucrats is
related: essentially in the effort to show where "everyone" stands on this
issue, everyone is pigeonholed with a cliche that, if not absolutely wrong,
grossly oversimplifies what they have argued. An awful lot of the entire debate
involves the defeat of straw men through gross mischacterization of far more
complex arguments. Hence, Johnson becomes reduced to "strong state;" Samuels
seems to have said nothing other than "reciprocal consent;" Pempel and Tsunekawa
believe in "Corporatism Without Labor;" Muramatsu and Krauss have argued for
"patterned pluralism," etc. etc. And these labels become substitutes for
actually reading what the authors have used them for; surrogates for actually
dealing with what the arguments seek to suggest; and in turn the labels get
pasted on to a whole lot of crap that the authors themselves never even sought
to deal with in the first place.

Far more than I planned to say; far more than anyone may wish to deal with. But
perhaps for a few out there, some food for thought.
T.J. Pempel