With last week’s historic Japanese elections in mind, I asked Princeton University professor “Christina Davis”:http://www.princeton.edu/~cldavis/ for her thoughts on the election results. She kindly provided the following:
Japan’s August 30th election has been hailed as revolutionary. After fifty-five years as the ruling party with only an 8 month period out of power in 1993-94, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) was thrown out of office. The opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) won 308 of 480 seats in the Lower House for a decisive victory that gives it majority control. Through a coalition with two smaller parties it will also hold a majority in the upper house. What does this mean for Japanese politics?
First, alternation in power will give a much needed jolt to Japanese democracy. The ongoing rule of the LDP despite almost two decades of economic malaise had seemed an anomaly from the most basic expectations of democratic accountability. How could the LDP ride to success on the back of high economic growth in the first thirty-five years of its rule but not be held responsible for the crash of the bubble economy and stagnant growth of the 1990s? Retrospective voting theories would suggest that the Japanese people, who observed rising unemployment, bankruptcy, and social dislocation with alarm, would direct their anger at the incumbent party. They did to the extent that the support rate of the LDP has fallen steadily while unaligned voters grew to form 40 percent of the electorate. But voters feared that the opposition would not be competent to rule, the LDP benefited from all the powers of incumbency arising from years of directing the pork to favored regions and groups, and the political saavy and calls for change of Junichiro Koizumi resurrected the popularity of the LDP during his term as prime minister from 2001 to 2005. But when the Koizumi reforms brought rising inequality along with a return to economic growth, it contributed to backlash against the LDP. The party proved unable to reinvent itself this time as it suffered from a string of weak prime ministers and the steady erosion of support from key constituencies, in part the very result of the economic reforms launched by Koizumi. When the global economic crisis pushed Japan back into recession it was clear that the economic growth supported by Koizumi reforms could not withstand a global downturn of demand and left some sectors of society more vulnerable. Voters were informed on the eve of the election that Japanese unemployment had reached 5.7 percent, which would be positive figures in Europe but represented a historic high in Japan. This election suggests that finally the voters decided that risking a new set of leaders was necessary to change the direction of the country. Thirty percent of LDP supporters and 53 percent of unaffiliated voters cast their ballot for DPJ candidates.
The DPJ itself does not represent a radical shift in ideology. The party is composed of a diverse group of politicians including conservatives who defected from the LDP to former socialist party members. The DPJ election campaign manifest emphasized changes in governance to make the bureaucracy more responsive to political direction and new policies to improve the social safety net. To a large extent their victory reflects the rejection of the LDP, both as the status quo and for the reforms brought under Koizumi. More important than any policies enacted by the new administration led by Yukio Hatoyama, however, will be the emergence of a new reality in Japanese politics where dissatisfaction of the public leads to change of government.
Whether the DPJ can reverse the oft-cited characterization of Japanese politics by Chalmers Johnson as “politicians reign, bureaucrats rule” will be the most interesting challenge for the new government. The DPJ plans to increase supervision of the bureaucracy through creation of a National Strategy Bureau placed under the Prime Minister with authority to review policies and personnel decisions. An administrative reform council will review the budget. One hundred politicians will be appointed to serve in top positions within the bureaucratic organization structure These reforms will create incentives to make the bureaucracy more responsive to policy initiatives from politicians. But can the DPJ to come up with such initiatives? Given that 146 of the elected DPJ politicians are newcomers to the Diet and Japan lacks the large staff and sophisticated think tank and lobbying group sources of information on policy proposals found in the United States, media reports have questioned the ability of the DPJ to change the dominance of the elite bureaucrats over policy. The monopoly of information in the bureaucracy is its source of power. Nonetheless, politicians do not need to be writing the laws to wield control over policy outcomes. DPJ newcomers are full of ideas and the party is seeking input from private sector and academic sources in addition to the impressive political experience of old-timers in the party such as Ichiro Ozawa. Using its authority as the ruling party and by enacting institutional reforms, the DPJ goal must be to effectively control the bureaucracy rather than replace their functions. The DPJ has quickly asserted its control over the budget and appointments, and will move forward rapidly to implement the ideas in the policy manifest. Some policy ideas will be discarded as impractical after consultation with experts in the bureaucracy, and the party ignores such caution to their own peril given the need to produce positive results to legitimate their rule. Having come to power on the anger against policy failures of the LDP, the new ruling party knows that it must deliver results to retain control.