2002.01.15

Politically Dominated Policy Making: - 1

Learning from the Successful Handling of the Financial Crisis

I. Introduction

For years now we have been hearing calls in Japan for seiji shudo, a “politics-dominated” system, meaning that elected politicians should take the lead in making public policy. Progress in this direction is evident in a number of areas, but we have not yet firmly established a system of clear leadership by politicians. Along with the overhaul of the central government organization implemented in January 2001, a new system was introduced under which legislators serve as senior vice-ministers and parliamentary secretaries in all the cabinet-level ministries and agencies. But this system still remains in the trial-and-error stage.

I started my own career as a politician in 1993. Running as a candidate of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, I won a seat in the general election for the House of Representatives in July of that year. But as a result of the election the LDP fell out of power, and so my parliamentary debut was as a member of the opposition.

Under the so-called 1955 setup,* bureaucrats drafted policy proposals and then took them to the LDP's Policy Research Council for approval, relying on the political power of the LDP to secure passage of the legislation required to implement the policies (I will return to this topic below). But this arrangement was predicated on the LDP's being the party in power. The bureaucrats have a strong tendency to see the members of the ruling party or parties as their allies, and as soon as the LDP fell from power, they started keeping their distance from the Liberal Democrats. Since the party had until then relied on the bureaucracy as its source of policy ideas, its veteran legislators were at a complete loss.

Having just been elected, however, I had no experience of the previous setup. I believed that my mission as an elected representative was to listen to the voices of my constituents and to turn this input into concrete policies. So I plunged right into the task of overcoming the handicap of being in the opposition and trying to find ways of formulating policy proposals and getting them approved from my position outside the government.

Less than a year later the LDP returned to power, this time as the senior partner in a ruling coalition. But short though it was, my experience as an opposition legislator was valuable, teaching me the limits of the bureaucracy-dominated system of policy making.

This experience stood me in good stead three years later, when I found myself in a situation requiring the exercise of politically led policy making on an extremely important issue. This was the emergency resulting from the financial panic of late 1997. The traditional bureaucracy-dominated system was incapable of dealing with this situation, and the policy-making initiative fell into the hands of junior legislators like me.

In the late summer and autumn of 1998, as efforts to deal with the crisis came to a head, media attention focused on the major role being played by us younger legislators. People dubbed us seisaku shinjinrui, a term that might be literally translated “new breed of policy makers” but that my colleague Yasuhisa Shiozaki has more creatively rendered “brats in the Diet.” As I will explain in the following section, this new breed of activist legislators did not suddenly spring into existence out of nowhere.

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