TO RICK KATZ POST:
RK: In the case of Koizumi, I would say he took a calculated risk to fight for his policy goal. He had not fought, he would havebeen neutered, so he had little to lose. He would rather have gone down fighting than accept being neutered. Beyond that, years of precedent had shown that, when he engaged in "Koizumi theater," couching policy debates as a morality play between the good guys and the bad guys ("forces of resistance"), it boosted his approval ratings. So, his "Hail May pass" of a snap election, expelling postal rebels, appointing assassins, and turning the postal issue into a grand referendum on the whole notion of reform was a calcuated risk by someone quite attuned to public feeling.

ESK: Yes, everything you say about Koizumi is true but I think this is much clearer in retrospect than at the time. I think almost all observers and perhaps Koizumi himself were at least surprised at the size of his victory. Further, I think Koizumi, like Noda, had more than just self-interested goals of victory in the election in mind with postal privatization. It had been his pet issue for 20 years at least.

RK: What is strange about Koizumi is that, having won in a landslide, he did not use his newfound power to push harder for his policy goals. E.g. in the effort to pass the postal bill, he had let it be watered down. He could have restored the original bill. He chose not to.

ESK: I have it on good authority that Koizumi ,after the landslide in 2005, wanted to try to unite the party again. As we saw clearly after his retirement, the reactionary forces were still in the party (and definitely reasserted themselves under Abe). After the election victory, Koizumi also tried to find a compromise between the old LDP "bottom up" and his own style of more "top down" policymaking, as part of that effort to reunite the party. Maybe he wanted to change the LDP more than destroy it after all, once he won?

RK:In the case of Noda, by contrast, one either has to assume complete folly if his goal was self-interested power-seeking, orelse one has to judge that passing the tax was more important to him than either his own power or that of his party. How many people on this list believed in January that prioritizing the tax hike would help Nodaand the DPJ? How many still believed that in April or May?

ESK: Definitely. Noda's goal was one he believed in and that was necessary for the country and its future (we'll see if he was correct; Paul Krugman has been in Japan saying that the timing of the consumption tax increase was bad and may knock Japan back into recession). Koizumi's postal privatization I think was
multi-pronged: he thought it was good for the country, but it also could vindicate him, he had nothing to lose (as you pointed out), and it would help destroy what he perceived as the evil at the heart of Japanese politics--the old Tanaka/Takeshita faction and its influence in the party, bottom-up policymaking, and policies of pork barrel, money, etc. I think anyone who interprets Koizumi's goals as only economic is making a mistake in evaluating him. And maybe that is part of the problem in this discussion: Koizumi cannot be characterized along one dimension of goal-seeking; maybe Noda can?

ESK: Definitely on other social sciences that cannot predict either the future or sometimes even the past well. That's also another way of saying that science makes a lot of mistakes on its way to trying to find "truth." Lots of different analyses, conflict, attacking the accepted wisdom, etc. Accepted paradigms that provide explanations in one era, will be thrown out and replaced in others. Indeed, isn't that part of the scientific method itself? That is what is so ridiculous about the current Republican attempt to cut off funding for political science on the grounds that it "can't predict." They either fundamentally don't understand the nature of science or that's just a cover for their real aim which is to make sure people who can explain what they do don't have the resources to do it.
Or both.
Best regards,

Ellis S. Krauss