Mikitaka Masuyama

Japan: The Prime Minister and the Japanese Diet

Traditionally, executive leadership has been considered weak and largely irrelevant in Japanese politics. The prime minister from 1955 to 1993 was selected from the dominant Liberal Democratic Party and was constrained by the strong internecine factional conflict in his party and, for much of the 1970s and early 1980s, a razor-thin parliamentary majority. Since 1993, coalition politics have become the norm. While most scholars suggest that coalition politics would constrain the executive even further, the decline of factionalism and increased efficacy of ‘going public’ has allowed a greater potential for executive leadership in Japan.

Is the Japanese Diet Consensual

The institutional design of the Japanese Diet is commonly believed to necessitate interparty accommodation and to make the legislative process more ‘viscous’ than it appears. This common belief about the Diet is challenged by examining the Constitution, the Diet Law, the House Rules, and parliamentary practices with special attention to agenda setting procedures. It is argued that the ‘unanimity norm’ is less binding than commonly recognised. By applying the criteria proposed by Döring, this paper compares the Diet with western European parliaments, and shows that it ranks relatively high in terms of the ruling majoritys ability to control the legislative agenda. Although the post‐war Diet is modelled on the legislative process in the US Congress, it is critically important to keep in mind that the constitutional principle of the Diet follows the fusion of power in the British parliament. The picture that emerges from the analysis is in strong contrast to the traditional image of the Japanese Diet and sheds new light on the majoritarian foundation of the Diet.

Measuring Judicial Independence Reconsidered: Survival Analysis, Matching, and Average Treatment Effects

This article reconsiders how to judge judicial independence by using the Japanese judicature, one of the allegedly-most dependent judiciary branches. In their influential work, Ramseyer and Rasmusen (2003) argue that judges who once belonged to a leftist group take longer to reach a ‘moderately prestigious status’ under the long-term conservative rule of Japan. Their method does not, however, deal appropriately with the possibility of judges not reaching this position because the judge dies, retires early, or is still at the early stage of her career. Ramseyer and Rasmusen also mistakenly assume that all judges will eventually obtain this position. This article develops a survival analysis model of judicial careers and attempts to solve the problems of censoring, left truncation, and split population. We also offer a way to utilize a matching procedure to estimate average treatment effects on censored time-to-event as well as event occurrence. We re-analyze a corrected version of Ramseyer and Rasmusens data using their and our methods. One of the most important findings is that, contrary to what Ramseyer and Rasmusen argue, leftist judges are not discriminated against in terms of the timing of promotion.

Party Politics and Decentralization in Japan and France: When the Opposition Governs (review)

written, it has a tendency to delve into too much description—particularly toward the end as Park traces recent developments in Japanese politics and their effects on public fi nance. To the extent that this book is a “study of record” and the last word on the FILP, this may be a good thing; readers interested in extracting a pithy “take-away” from the book, however, may have to work a little too hard. Other readers may fault the book for falling short of its theoretical promise. Toward the end of chapter 2, Park outlines a detailed historical-institutional framework and seems to suggest that the framework will be systematically applied in the historical and empirical chapters (at least this was my reading of it). This proves not to be the case; references to the concepts, premises, and theories of that framework in subsequent chapters are far more implicit than explicit. Scholars looking for a systematic analysis of how theories of institutional change measure up to reality may fi nd themselves disappointed. In my view, these issues are far outweighed by the book’s many strengths, including its rich and highly readable historical narrative, conceptual creativity, and enlightening analysis of the FILP’s role as a bridge between Japan’s political and fi nancial worlds. Spending without Taxation is a fi ne and accessible piece of scholarship that is a must-read for followers of Japanese politics. Its fascinating historical chapters are likely to appeal to scholars interested in the evolution of Japanese public fi nance and, more specifi cally, fi nancial and economic developments during the occupation period. Finally, the book should be required reading for anyone tempted to conclude that the collapse of the economic bubble in 1990–91 marked the end of an era; as Park so convincingly reminds us, understanding the dynamic workings of enduring institutions like the FILP helps explain not only the successes of the past but also the demise of Japan’s postwar recipe for economic growth and the country’s current inability to move on.

Bandwagon Competition or Duration Dependence? Comment on ‘Shaping Policy Diffusion’

Ito (2001) has made an interesting argument on policy making in Japanese local governments. However, his analysis is based on the estimates from the models that do not properly take into account the temporal dependence of regional law adoption. The purpose of this comment is to point out a troubling aspect of Itos event history modeling, and to put the existence of potential problems caused by temporally dependent observations into perspective.

The Diet 2001

Koizumi Junichiros sweeping victory in the presidential primary of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) represents a palpable change in the national mood that may substantially affect the parliamentary conditions, although its impact on legislation is yet to be seen. In this essay, I briefly review the Diet in the past one year. In particular, the review deals with the legislative records in the 150–152 Diet sessions.