Can the DPJ legislate a new relationship with the bureaucracy?

On Tuesday, the House of Representatives began debate on the Hatoyama cabinet's bill revising the National Civil Service Law, the first of three cabinet bills intended to introduce political leadership to be considered in the Diet (the others being bills establishing the national strategy bureau and increasing the number of sub-cabinet political appointees).

If passed, the revision will, among other things, introduce a Cabinet Personnel Bureau (CPB) attached to the Cabinet Secretariat. The cabinet will be able to control the promotion of senior civil servants — administrative vice ministers, division chiefs, and section chiefs — with the cabinet selecting senior bureaucrats from a list with an eye towards not just ability but also the willingness to perform, as suggested by Sengoku Yoshito, Hatoyama's administrative reform czar in an interview in Asahi's Globe section. The expectation seems to be that the government would move senior officials laterally, away from their "home" ministries, in the hope of overcoming compartmentalized administration. When asked whether appeals to expertise could render the revision a dead letter, Sengoku questioned whether the Kasumigaseki's level of expertise is as high as assumed, although when pressed he suggested that perhaps the Finance Ministry's budget bureau will enjoy a certain degree of insulation. Another reform included in the bill would enable the CPB to demote officials.

Looking over this plan — which shares certain features with plans for a basic law produced under by the LDP, and which has in fact been criticized by the LDP and YP leader Watanabe Yoshimi for being weaker than the Aso government's plan — it is unclear to me what exactly the government hopes to achieve. Sengoku stresses the importance of overcoming compartmentalization. This plan may be effective to this end, but I wonder whether it raises other problems in its place.

Under the Thatcher government, the British civil service faced a prime minister who intervened aggressively in civil service personnel administration, which had perverse consequences for the civil service. Traditionally, the job of British civil servants was to provide advice and options for ministers as they went about implementing the cabinet's program as outlined in the party's manifesto. Bureaucrats would push back against ministers, they would do their best to dissuade ministers from making poor choices, but ultimately they served political leaders as a matter of professional duty. Under Margaret Thatcher, bureaucrats became more circumspect about the advice they dispensed to political leaders as prospects for promotion became linked to sticking with the government's program, and were more inclined to tell ministers what they wanted to hear instead of offering frank advice. In other words, security in office for civil servants was linked to the quality of service that they provided political leaders. Colin Campbell and Graham Wilson consider the changes that occurred under the Thatcher government to have been so consequential as to have marked the "end of Whitehall."

Accordingly, it is unclear from this legislation how the government intends to ensure that the bureaucracy will provide quality guidance to the government when the bureaucrats will have incentives to please political leaders.

I understand why the Hatoyama government feels obligated to enshrine reform in law, as it gives the government's reform agenda a symbolic permanence that it otherwise lacks. And it it is understandable why in the near term the Hatoyama government wants to be able to control senior-level personnel appointments. It needs to sever whatever links remain between the bureaucracy and the ancien regime. Under LDP rule, after all, the LDP and the bureaucracy developed a symbiotic relationship, in which the party preserved the prerogatives of the bureaucracy while the bureaucracy served as a policymaking staff for the party and cooperated with LDP backbenchers' desires to direct national resources to particularistic ends. To build a new system that DPJ needs to be able to forestall sabotage, shirking, or foot dragging on the part of the bureaucracy.

But I would argue that the most effective reforms to the policymaking process have been those that have limited interaction between bureaucrats and backbenchers, and intra-party reforms that have sharply limited the ability of backbenchers to participate in policymaking. Without being able to play backbenchers off against the cabinet, bureaucrats have already had to accommodate DPJ rule to an extent that few expected.

As for the goal of building a politically neutral civil service that dutifully serves the government of the day, perhaps the only way to build such a civil service is regular changes in ruling party. The British civil service has been described as "politically promiscuous," willing to serve any government even when successive governments have contradictory aims.  If there is not regular alternation in power, the bureaucracy will wind up simply shifting its loyalties to the new long-term ruling party, bending to the interests of the ruling party instead of dispensing guidance with an eye towards national and public interests.

In short, the process of building a new policymaking system will require at least as much change in the minds of actors in the system as change in formal institutions, if not more. As the DPJ comes to see the bureaucracy not as a hostile remnant of the ancien regime but as the source of expert advice, as the bureaucrats come to recognize the legitimacy of a government in power on the basis of a public mandate for its electoral program and come to recognize that there is a realistic chance of a different party with a different program taking power, the system will change to something approximating top-down political leadership. The new system will not come about through bullying the bureaucracy — except perhaps in very rare instances — but through the bureaucracy's recognizing the role it has to play in the new system, and the DPJ's (and whatever ruling party succeeds it) recognizing that no advanced industrial democracy functions without an effective civil service.

Edano joins the cabinet

Edano Yukio, one of the few DPJ politicians who was expected to receive a cabinet appointment last year but didn't, will no longer be outside of the government. He will take over responsibility for the Government Revitalization Unit (GRU), which was previously headed by Sengoku Yoshito, who since Kan Naoto moved to the finance ministry last month was also serving as minister responsible for the national strategy office. Sengoku will take sole responsibility for the NSO while Edano heads the GRU.

Coming in the wake of the indictment of three of Ozawa Ichiro's former secretaries, the media is reporting Edano's appointment as another blow to Ozawa, as Edano is marked as an anti-Ozawa partisan, having opposed the DPJ's merger with Ozawa's Liberal Party from the very beginning and continuing to criticize Ozawa in the years following the merger. Indeed, not long ago Edano publicly suggested that if Ozawa could not convince the public to see his side of the story, he would "have to take responsibility" for what he had done (i.e., resign).

Yomiuri wonders whether Edano's appointment — with Ozawa's acquiescence — signals a diminution of Ozawa's power.

That might be reading too much into an appointment that is not altogether surprising. There was considerable surprise back in September that Edano had been left out of the government, suggesting that he was at the top of the list of backbenchers waiting to join the cabinet. The budget review hearings conducted by the GRU last year show that the post is an important one, that needed to be filled by a full-time minister, especially with the government's submitting legislation that will elevate the national strategy office into a full bureau (and give the GRU's hearings legal standing). Sengoku will undoubtedly have his hands full building a bureau whose powers and functions remain a mystery. Perhaps the timing was intended to show that Hatoyama is in charge even as he confirmed Ozawa's staying on as secretary-general, but believe it or not, the story of the Hatoyama government is not entirely or even mostly a story about Ozawa Ichiro.

Ozawa has pressured the government on certain issues and centralized functions in his office so that all requests to the government go through him, but the media's focus on Ozawa has overshadowed the important work the government is doing on building a new policymaking process, a project with which Ozawa is in full agreement (but stories about areas in which the government and the secretary-general are in full agreement apparently make for less interesting copy). In addition to the above-mentioned "political leadership" bill, the cabinet is also set to approve a civil service reform bill that could completely upend the traditional practices of the bureaucracy, doing away with the position of administrative vice-minister, restoring to the cabinet the right to make personnel appointments (and with it, the right to ignore seniority within the ministry and appoint younger officials or civilians to senior posts), and other reforms. These are remarkable changes under consideration — with remarkably little public protest from the bureaucracy — and they deserve more attention than they have received.

How the Hatoyama cabinet manages Ozawa has from the beginning been one of the more important challenges facing the DPJ-led government, but it is by no means the only challenge or the most important challenge. It would be nice if the news media remembered that from time to time and devoted a little less attention to the ongoing drama of Ozawa and a little more attention to what the Hatoyama government is actually doing with the majority the public awarded it last year.

Hatoyama restates his government's mission

The 2009 extraordinary Diet session, the first under the leadership of Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio's cabinet, opened Monday with a speech by Hatoyama to a Diet populated by an overwhelming majority of parliamentarians from his Democratic Party of Japan. He declared Monday the first day of a "bloodless Heisei Restoration," a transformation without black ships and without war and occupation.

The substance of the speech was familiar enough. He opened by reiterating what I've previously described as the twin themes of the DPJ's campaign narrative: "regime change" (Hatoyama used the phrase "major cleanup" in this speech) and "livelihoods first." Discussing his government's plans for cleaning up the policymaking process and changing the relationship between politicians and bureaucrats, the prime minister showed once again that the DPJ's plans are clearest when it comes to reforming Japanese governance. From strengthening political leadership within ministries to dissolving the administrative vice ministers' council to creating new cabinet committees to stripping the DPJ of its policymaking bodies, the Hatoyama government is consciously erecting a new system of government. And in the name of conducting government with the public interest in mind, his government is changing how public money will be budgeted, shifting the focus of budgeting "from concrete to people" in Hatoyama's words.

But more than changing how public money is spent, Hatoyama stressed that in the name of "fraternity" his government would work to protect the most vulnerable members of Japanese society, a focus that has particular resonance after the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare's recent report on poverty in Japan found that the trend detected in a 2003 OECD report has continued (as of 2006), with 15.7% of the public's earning less than half the median income, placing Japan as fourth-worst in the OECD.

The speech was by and large a composite of Hatoyama's campaign speeches, his essay in VOICE, and his speech at the opening of the UN General Assembly in September. Drawing from the VOICE essay, he reiterated the importance of bolstering Japanese civil society and community, and, in words reminiscent of Ozawa Ichiro's speech at the DPJ convention in January, said that Japan needs an "economy for human beings." He repeated the DPJ's emphasis on the need for focus on values other than economic growth, that his government would, while promoting economic competition, would also work to support employment and foster skills, build a safety net, and pursue consumer-oriented goals like food safety. This kinder, gentler economy will be joined with greater activism by citizens in education and the provision of health and welfare in their communities.

On foreign policy, he once again stated his ambition for Japan to serve as a "bridge" internationally. He wants Japan to take the lead on climate change and energy issues, nuclear non-proliferation, and cooperation in Asia — and he wants to cooperate with the US on these global issues. He repeated the DPJ's desire for an "equal" relationship with the US, and stated that the equality of which he speaks refers to an equal partnership to combat the aforementioned global problems. In other words, an equal US-Japan relationship is one focused on issues other than the bilateral security issues that have crowded the bilateral agenda since the early 1990s, issues like the future of the US military presence in Okinawa. The Obama administration should appreciate that the Hatoyama government is no less eager to move on to other areas of cooperation, but that it wants the best deal possible for the people of Okinawa — and the prime minister, his cabinet, his party, and his coalition partners clearly do not believe that the current plan is the best possible deal.

If the content of Hatoyama's address adds little to what we already know about what Hatoyama and his government want to accomplish, I think the speech tells us much about the kind of prime minister Hatoyama is becoming. As I wrote in early September when Hatoyama was assembling his cabinet, it appears that Hatoyama is governing as first among equals in a cabinet of heavyweights, with the help of an inner cabinet of two or three close advisers. An Asahi article describes the Hatoyama cabinet as being characterized by cabinet ministers submitting policy proposals, often by floating trial balloons in the media, while the prime minister, with the help of Kan Naoto, the deputy prime minister and head of the national strategy office, Hirano Hirofumi, the chief cabinet secretary, and Sengoku Yoshito, head of the administrative reform council, decides which policies to approve. The government will face a test as it attempts to whittle down the gigantic first draft of the 2010 budget, but I think that it is unlikely that this basic pattern will change. Hatoyama has referred to himself as a "conductor-like" prime minister. His orchestra may at times be cacophonous — especially with Kamei Shizuka in the mix — but I see open debates among ministers regarding national policy better than the alternative of discussions among bureaucrats behind closed doors. That said, whether the Hatoyama system succeeds as a vehicle for implementing policies remains to be seen.

Meanwhile as the conductor Hatoyama will undoubtedly continue to give speeches that may be maddeningly vague as far as policy is concerned but will offer regular reminders of his government's mission to his subordinates in the cabinet, his party's backbenchers, and the public at large.

Slowly but surely a new system of government is taking shape in Japan.

The DPJ's quiet revolution

In a contribution to Foreign Policy's "Think Again" feature, Paul Scalise and Devin Stewart maintain that the DPJ victory will result in "the same old stagnation in Tokyo." While there are points worth considering in their piece — especially on foreign policy and the notion that the DPJ is "anti-capitalist" — on the whole Scalise and Stewart, far from offering new thinking about the DPJ, offer the same old cliches about the DPJ's policy priorities and its internal dynamics. [For the record, I know them both — indeed, Scalise and I have argued many of these points in person.]

First, they argue DPJ politicians are not revolutionary: "Like those of the long-reigning Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), they are political opportunists without any long-standing ideological position or dominant constituency. Their only common desire is to be elected." They repeat the standard claim that "many members of the DPJ leadership were at one point members of the LDP," implying that the presence of former LDP members in the DPJ means that the party couldn't possibly stand for change. (Because apparently the most important fact about Ozawa Ichiro and Hatoyama Yukio, among others, is that they began their careers in the LDP, not that they spent nearly the past two decades trying to destroy LDP rule and usher in a new style of politics.)

This argument also ignores the fact that the party's candidates were remarkably unified behind the DPJ's manifesto during the general election. Far from being "political opportunists," the bulk of the DPJ's newly elected members are true believers in the party's agenda, which can be simplified as "Seikatsu dai-ichi" (Livelihoods first, i.e. pensions reform, building a new safety net, etc.) and "Seiken kotai" (regime change, mainly changing the relationship between politicians and bureaucrats in Tokyo, decentralizing the government, etc.). The point is that the DPJ has a remarkably clear agenda, which enjoys the support of the party's Diet members. Indeed, as Michael Cucek, the no longer anonymous author of Shisaku, worried before the election, the problem may be that the party members are too loyal to the agenda and not opportunistic enough. The opinions of DPJ backbenchers, however, may not matter much one way or another (more on this momentarily). The politicians in the cabinet — the DPJ politicians who do matter — are not mere opportunists, but they are not naive idealists either. The standard caricature of the DPJ and its leaders is simply wrong.

And in any case, the DPJ does not need to be "revolutionary" to deliver meaningful change to how Japan is governed.

Second, they express dismay that the DPJ is not the party of economic reform. Perhaps this is the case, although they make the same mistake that they criticize the media for making: they treat "economic reform" as an "empty buzzword," as nowhere in this section do they bother to define what they mean by economic reform. Surely there is no single way for Japan to reform, beyond the broad idea that Japan ought to transition to a more balanced model of economic growth, as I recently discussed here. There is not a single path to a new Japanese model, and as with any major institutional change, it will entail bargaining and compromises among various social actors.

Scalise and Stewart expect a new economic system to emerge in the manner similar to Koizumi Junichiro's style of reform: "Were the DPJ to change this system, it would need to bolster party unity, appeal to progressive constituencies with a transformative economic plan, and then gin up grass-roots support." One, as I have already noted, the DPJ is as unified as it is going to get, and is certainly more unified than the LDP probably ever was when it was in government. And in the event that DPJ backbenchers disagree with government plans, administrative changes already implemented will make it difficult for them to register their disagreement (see the subsequent section for more on this). Second, I'm not quite clear what they mean by "progressive constituencies." Consumer groups? Activist groups? Foreign investors? Who exactly do they mean?

Finally, they anticipate a lack of reform due to the structure of the DPJ — and its "bickering," "fragmented," "hodgepodge" coalition government indebted "to many masters" — and not, as I argued the other day, the fact that transforming an economic system is challenging in the best of times, and even more challenging in light of the LDP's having left the new government with a gross debt/GDP ratio now in excess of 200% and the global economy's recovering from a historic crisis. The obstacles facing the new government are without question considerable, but far from being hindered by a divided, bickering party and government, Hatoyama and his senior ministers have taken a number of steps that should give the DPJ-led government a fighting chance of succeeding in changing the Japanese economy for the better. The government may well fail, but it won't fail because of irreconcilable divisions within the cabinet. Indeed, what Scalise and Stewart see as "heated internal bickering" (a code word for Kamei Shizuka) I see as a massive step forward: note that the bickering is internal not to the ruling party or between ruling party and cabinet as under the LDP, the debate is occurring within the cabinet, among cabinet ministers. Cabinet ministers are actually debating what the government's policy should be! They're not just signing off on some document handed to them by administrative vice ministers or the party general council! What they see as bickering I see as a feature, not a bug. No government in the world — no democratic government anyway — is characterized by perfect unanimity among its leaders. The question is how the system manages disagreements and whether it is capable of making decisions and following through on them. The LDP system failed in large part because disagreements crossed institutional lines, undermining the cabinet's ability to establish policy priorities and lead.

Which brings me to the biggest flaw in their argument: they completely misunderstand the nature of the changes proposed by the DPJ when it comes to the relationship between politicians and bureaucrats. In describing the system of LDP rule, they see bureaucratic dominance as the result of the failings of Diet members, not the result of the institutional weakness of the cabinet relative to the LDP's internal organs (most notably the policy research council) and the bureaucracy itself: "...Politicians lack the time, energy, staff, and expertise necessary to write bills."

Undoubtedly individual backbenchers have had few resources of their own — but again, they ignore the power LDP backbenchers were able to wield as members of the PRC, working in cooperation with bureaucrats against the cabinet. But the answer to making Japan's government more effective is not strengthening the power and expertise of individual backbenchers. Indeed, the answer lies is ensuring that backbenchers have fewer avenues to exercise influence while concentrating all policymaking power in the cabinet.

Which is precisely what the DPJ plans to do. Scalise and Stewart don't seem to appreciate the significance of what the Hatoyama government has done in just the first few weeks of power: "The ruling party has called for the creation of a few smaller cabinet-focused committees to replace a few older party-centric and ministry-centric committees. It has also restricted the media's access to the bureaucracy -- hardly signaling its commitment to a more democratic and transparent legislative process."

What they miss here is just how powerful an actor the "party-centric" committees — the LDP's PRC — was in the policymaking process and how having powerful policymaking institutions outside the cabinet prevented it from controlling the policymaking process. And the idea that replacing bureaucratic press conferences with press conferences by political appointees is somehow undemocratic is laughable, and is indeed intended to ensure that the government's policy message is conveyed to the public clearly by the officials responsible for drafting it.

Scalise and Stewart simply miss the idea that the DPJ is trying to implement a Westminster system in Japan — and they simply miss just how radical an idea this is when one considers it in contrast to the LDP's "un-Westminster" system of government, in which the ruling party and its organs, together with the bureaucracy, had extensive veto power over the cabinet. The DPJ is trying to create a cabinet-led system of government that will be able to attempt some of the reforms desired by Scalise and Stewart, reforms that LDP-led cabinets struggled to maneuver through a cumbersome policymaking progress laden with veto points. At the very least the DPJ is creating a system of government that will be capable of experimentation and government by trial and error, which, after two lost decades, may be the only way for Japan to get a new economic system.

So what do we know about the DPJ's system of government so far?

Quite a lot, actually, because in its first days in office the Hatoyama government stated precisely how it plans to govern.

First, the DPJ as a ruling party is weak and — unlike the LDP — has no formal role in the policymaking process. The DPJ's policy research council has closed up shop; policy coordination will be managed by a national strategy bureau attached by the cabinet and headed by Kan Naoto, deputy prime minister and one of the DPJ's most senior politicians. Ozawa, the new DPJ secretary-general, has been given tremendous power over the ruling party and its Diet majority, making him the essential figure for getting the cabinet's policies passed into law.

Indeed, Ozawa will perform a function essential to a Westminster system: his job will be to ensure that the cabinet has the confidence of the ruling party, through which it controls parliament. Ozawa is hard at work on ensuring that backbenchers follow his lead, and by extension the lead of the cabinet. Far from strengthening the power of backbenchers, which Scalise and Stewart for some reason see as essential to changing how the government works, the DPJ intends to reform the system so that the job of a DPJ backbencher is to receive instructions on how to vote from Ozawa, show up to vote at the right time, and take the necessary steps to get reelected and so preserve the government's majority. Unlike under LDP rule, when backbenchers were busy with endless party committee and subcommittee meetings, participation in which being essential for getting ahead in the party, the cabinet and the party leadership expect that DPJ backbenchers will be seen and not heard.

To make this point absolutely clear, the DPJ has informed its Diet members that legislation introduced by Diet members (as opposed to legislation introduced by the cabinet) will be banned "in principle," with exceptions made for legislation related to elections and "political activities." (Presumably the latter exceptions will enable Ozawa to move legislation related to liberalizing campaign activities, long one of his pet issues and the subject of his recent study trip to Britain.) Also while in Britain Ozawa studied the daily activities of parliamentarians — in other words, what backbenchers do with their time since they have little to do when it comes to policymaking.

Beyond these changes, perhaps the biggest oversight on the part of Scalise and Stewart is their failure to appreciate the radicalism of the DPJ's changes to the budgeting process. As I argued before the general election, the DPJ's idea of "regime change" cannot be understood without looking at its plans for the budgeting process. In their plans to transfer budgetary authority to the cabinet — which, after all, is given budgetary authority by the constitution — the DPJ is positioning itself to deliver a democratic revolution in Japan by enabling political leaders to determine how the public's money is spent, and to redirect funds in the direction of policy priorities desired by voters.

The Hatoyama government has already taken the first steps towards a new budgeting process. Just as it said it would, on Tuesday the cabinet approved a cabinet decision that canceled the Aso government's budgetary guidelines, instructed cabinet ministers to establish budget priorities from a "zero base" and to make substantial cuts to the extent possible, and stressed once again (as the DPJ did in its manifesto) that the government will be redoing the budget from scratch. It will not simply make incremental adjustments to last year's budget. At the same time, under the leadership of Furukawa Motohisa, deputy minister for the new national strategy office and the administrative renovation council, the Hatoyama government will devise a framework for next year's outlook for tax revenues and bond issues, a job in recent years done by the Council on Fiscal and Economic Policy (replaced by the NSO), but, as Asahi notes, "The finance ministry decided the specific size of the budget." The NSO will be taking the lead in all facets of the budgeting process. We will know more about the new budgeting process after 15 October, the new deadline for ministries to submit requests to the cabinet.

There are plenty of questions about how the NSO, the new budgetary process, and the new policymaking process more generally will work, but Scalise and Stewart miss several key points that suggest not only does the new government have radical ideas for the policymaking process, but also will likely succeed in making the government more top-down, more cabinet-centered, and more streamlined than any of its predecessors: (1) the Hatoyama government has clear ideas for how it wants to change the system of government (indeed clearer ideas here than in any other policy area), (2) relatedly, its members have spent years studying the LDP's failures, the failures of the Hosokawa government (in which several Hatoyama cabinet members participated, including Hatoyama himself), and of course the British system, (3) there is more public support on this issue than any other, as public opinion polls have shown overwhelming support for the DPJ's plans to redraw the relationship between politicians and bureaucrats, especially concerning budgeting, and (4) the bureaucracy is not nearly as opposed to the DPJ's plans as one might expect. Kan, for example, has been reaching out to reformist bureaucrats. The finance ministry, far from standing in the new government's way, accommodated the DPJ's request to hold off on budgeting for 2010 despite the ministry's desire to stick to the customary schedule. Spending ministries, the targets of the DPJ's desire to cut waste, have softened their once vocal opposition to the new government. They may yet attempt to derail the government through sabotage or foot-dragging, but there are enough reports out there of bureaucrats eager for political leadership to suggest that it is far too early to write off the DPJ's administrative reforms as doomed.

In short, the changes set in motion by the Hatoyama government will likely result in a stronger cabinet actually capable of leading Japan, and by leading I mean making difficult decisions instead of punting on every decision as the LDP did when in power. A new policymaking process is no guarantee of success, but the Hatoyama government is taking the right steps to give it a chance to change Japan for the better. It may not look like much of a revolution, but a quiet revolution is still a revolution.

The first day of the new era in Japanese politics

The DPJ wasted no time following the election of Hatoyama Yukio as prime minister Wednesday.

His cabinet lineup established, the DPJ-led government immediately set to work establishing a new relationship between the cabinet, DPJ backbenchers, and the bureaucracy.

Regarding the DPJ, its internal organizations, and its numerous backbenchers, the new government announced several measures to strip the DPJ of any policymaking role. On Wednesday morning Fujii Hirohisa, the new finance minister, reiterated an earlier pledge to abolish the party's tax commission and bolster the government's tax commission, reversing the situation that prevailed under the LDP. More significantly, the DPJ dissolved its policy research council completely. Contrary to earlier plans, Kan Naoto won't even carry the title of chair of the policy research council, because Ozawa Ichiro does not want cabinet members serving simultaneously in party posts. This single measure is a radical departure from LDP rule, under which the policy research council served as a shadow government, complete with committees and subcommittees mirroring the bureaus and offices of the bureaucracy. If bureaucrats wish to consult with politicians on policy, they'll have to go through cabinet ministers and the national strategy bureau.

The new government immediately established new regulations governing contact between bureaucrats and politicians not holding cabinet or sub-cabinet appointments. The regulations will require to bureaucrats to make the contents of all requests from Diet members known to their ministers — and bans, in principle, efforts by bureaucrats to influence Diet members. Abolishing the policy research council will close off an important avenue of influence under LDP governments. The government has also mandated that bureaucrats save records related to requests for subsidies, licenses, contracts, and the like from backbenchers and their secretaries.

Regarding the bureaucracy, the DPJ has made clear that it intends to constrain bureaucrats' activities. In particular, the DPJ plans to restrict media access to the bureaucracy, based on the idea that the cabinet is making policy and setting priorities and so its members should be responsible for explaining policies to the press, not the bureaucrats whose job is to execute the cabinet's policies. Discussing this proposal last week, Okada Katsuya naturally cited the British example: permanent secretaries in Whitehall do not give press conferences. Instead the government issued a new policy Wednesday. Political appointees in ministries will be responsible for communicating ministry policy to the media, and regular administrative vice ministerial press conferences are abolished. (To centralize explanations of the government's policies, the Hatoyama government ought to create a press secretary's office.) Naturally journalists have complained about this change.

The DPJ will also abolish the administrative vice ministers' council, which for 123 years has enabled bureaucrats to manage the work of the cabinet, as conservative newspapers did not fail to note in their reporting on its final meeting Monday. Bureaucrats will still meet amongst themselves, of course, but dissolving the council will strip them of a customary and powerful role in the policymaking process, hammering out disagreements across ministries before cabinet meetings.

The thinking underlying this framework can be found in a document released by the cabinet Wednesday. The document stresses that changing the balance of power between politicians and bureaucrats in favor of political leadership is essential to realizing "true democracy." This document is not a declaration of war on the bureaucracy as an institution. It is a constitutional document that aspires to restore constitutional government by ending the delegation of substantial powers from the cabinet to the bureaucracy. The second and third parts of the document contain most of the aforementioned regulations, but the first part explains the proper relationship between political leaders and bureaucrats, and the relationship of both with the public.

The role of politicians sent into ministries, the cabinet declared, is to command and supervise the work of officials on behalf of the public. Bureaucrats, meanwhile, are public servants — not a word regularly used to describe Japanese officialdom — and they are to implement the policies established by the public's representatives in government. They are to provide data to political leaders, present options for policies, and assist political leaders in the execution of their duties. The document stresses a division of labor between political leaders and officials: each should respect the other's responsibilities.

Ultimately these new regulations provide only a framework. It will take time for these principles to reshape the relationship in reality, time for bureaucrats to accept the leadership of politicians they may view as inferior, perhaps time even for politicians to accept that they are in fact the masters of the bureaucracy. Like any revolution, the DPJ's revolution in governance will entail a revolution in the mindsets of both politicians and bureaucrats.

But the Hatoyama government did not just outline a new framework for the relationship between politicians and bureaucrats on its first day in office. Its cabinet ministers hastened to set goals for the first weeks and months in office.

• Regarding the 2010 budget, Fujii stated that the government would decide upon a plan for the 2010 budgeting process by the beginning of October. The government will abandon the ceiling for budgetary requests established by the Aso government and start from scratch and hasten to find ways to save money in order to budget for programs promised by the DPJ during the campaign, such as monthly child allowances. In order to free up funds for next year's budget, the government plans to halt the Aso government's stimulus programs. The finance ministry informed the DPJ last week that it may be possible to recover nearly 6 trillion yen in funds that have yet to be distributed. Indeed, it turns out that more than half the budgeted funds have yet to be distributed. Tango Yasutake, the administrative vice minister of finance, indicated the ministry's support for cutting stimulus funds earlier this week, suggesting that as the Hatoyama government begins work it is already building a working relationship with the finance ministry.

• A critical player in drafting the new budget will be the national strategy bureau, the creation of which (or, its predecessor, the national strategy office, pending revision of the cabinet law) was one of the new government's first acts on Wednesday. Still no word, however, on who will be working under bureau chief Kan Naoto. Continuing on his theme of choice, Kan stressed that a cabinet budget committee will be created soon.

• Okada Katsuya, the new foreign minister, also made several key policy statements Wednesday. First, he instructed the ministry to investigate the circumstances surrounding the "secret" US-Japan agreement on the introduction of US nuclear weapons into Japan, with a goal of having the report ready by the end of November. He also stressed that he will take a flexible approach to the resolution of the Futenma issue.

• Relatedly, Kitazawa Toshimi, the new defense minister, said Wednesday that Japan will not be continuing its refueling mission in the Indian Ocean beyond the expiration of the enabling law in January.
  

Interestingly, as the Hatoyama government set to work, the LDP's Nakagawa Hidenao, who during the campaign said that preventing the DPJ from taking power was necessary to save Japan, wrote at his blog that the LDP ought to cooperate with the government as the new government works to shift power from the bureaucracy to the cabinet. He said that the LDP should in particular cooperate with the government to pass the legislation establishing the national strategy bureau. It seems that Nakagawa finally realizes that the DPJ is no less serious than Nakagawa and other LDP reformists about changing Japanese governance — indeed, arguably the DPJ's leaders are even more serious and have more comprehensive plans than anything LDP governments have offered in the way of administrative reform.

A new era in Japanese politics has truly begun.

Yomiuri contemplates the British model

Following the discussion on Fuji TV's Shin Hodo 2001 that I referenced yesterday, Yomiuri today has three articles addressing the flaws in the Westminster model, suggesting that the conservative approach to attacking the DPJ's administrative reforms will be to warn of the dangers of too much power concentrated in the cabinet.

One article warns of "voices" (no word on whose) questioning whether the DPJ's plans to introduce upwards of 120 Diet members into the government could hinder administration. The same article goes on to note that Britain's two-party system and political leadership emerged since the nineteenth century. It then warns that in Britain there is a problem with sub-cabinet officials using their positions to grandstand and otherwise advance their careers, and notes that a committee in the British House of Commons earlier this year recommended reducing the number of sub-cabinet officials.

A second article continues in the same vein as Fuji TV, warning of the over-concentration of power in the prime minister's office despite the constitution's giving decision making power to the cabinet — in effect reporting on the presidentialization of the British premiership under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Like Fuji TV, it cites Britain's participation in the Iraq war as an example of the dangers of the over-concentration of power in the hands of the prime minister, noting the use of special advisers as a means of sidestepping the cabinet. (No mention of how Prime Ministers Nakasone Yasuhiro and Koizumi Junichiro did precisely that to make for a more presidential Kantei capable of evading veto points within the government and the LDP.)

A third article looks at the recommendations that followed from Kan Naoto's study trip to the United Kingdom, in particular his recommendations for personnel appointees. The article quotes an anonymous DPJ member as saying, "The point is not the structure or system but the matter of the people. If politicians with leadership abilities are appointed, the bureaucrats will follow."

It is remarkable that for all the words used to denigrate the British system of government and link its flaws with the supposed dangers of the DPJ's desire to introduce political leadership, I come away with the impression that the DPJ's opponents have few good arguments to make against the DPJ's plans. It is easy to address all of Yomiuri's questions, in what, after all, are editorials disguised as reporting.

Regarding sub-cabinet officials, there are obviously risks associated with introducing so many inexperienced politicians into government positions. But the DPJ has already stated that cabinet ministers will pick their own sub-cabinet officials, which should give cabinet ministers a bit more control over their subordinates. Second, I expect that the DPJ will be putting former bureaucrats among its Diet members to work in ministries, presumably introducing greater professionalism into the work of political appointees. While their numbers are comparatively few, the former bureaucrats should help keep their amateur colleagues in line. Third, I can imagine that if a sub-cabinet official were to embarrass the cabinet through grandstanding, the official would face punishment from the party leadership, i.e. Ozawa Ichiro.

As for the idea of over-centralization in the prime minister, it is remarkable how Yomiuri can write this article but provide not a single example or precedent from the Japanese experience. Indeed, the most amazing thing in these three articles is a total lack of references to the policymaking process as it has existed under LDP governments. Based on Yomiuri's reports, one could be excused for thinking that Japan had a properly balanced system in which politicians and bureaucrats have clearly defined roles and responsibilities and that the decision making process worked well. Clearly that is far from the case: the LDP system has been characterized by power being so widely distributed among actors within the bureaucracy and the LDP that effective leadership by LDP leaders often depended on individual leaders sidestepping the formal decision making process to impose decisions on reluctant politicians and bureaucrats. Yomiuri talks of the dangers of concentrating power in the hands of the prime minister and his unelected advisers as if Koizumi Junichiro never existed. On this score its critique is particularly disingenuous because Kan — who will undoubtedly play an important role in building a new policymaking process — has stressed the importance of government by the appointed politicians in the cabinet. As I've argued, it appears that the DPJ is planning not for a presidential-style government but for cabinet government in the textbook British sense. It is particularly noteworthy that Kan has expressed his admiration for Britain's cabinet committees, which would provide a way to sidestep the custom of unanimous decision making in cabinet.

This idea of the textbook British model is important: the latter-day failings of the British system, while worth studying, ultimately say little about the dangers of the DPJ's plans. The DPJ is trying to copy Britain in a very broad sense, to move Japan in the direction of a system in which political leaders in the cabinet have the initiative in policymaking, with fewer veto players. It may take years before we can speak of a new Japanese "system," but just because it took Britain years to arrive at a point at which it could speak of political leadership is hardly an argument against the DPJ's taking the first steps in that direction. It is a matter of shifting the balance of power. Even Britain, for all its political leadership, has had to contend with supercilious bureaucrats.



As for the idea that appointing "politicians with leadership abilities" is essential, I do not deny that having the right people in the right positions can be tremendously important, but I disagree with the suggestion that good leaders — how does one know in advance who a good leader is, after all? — are more important than proper institutional design, especially because the LDP system's flaws are so readily apparent. The idea that the LDP's failures were simply the result of bad leaders strikes me as farcical.

Ultimately if the DPJ-led government is going to legislate and implement its policies, it is essential to introduce a policymaking process with fewer veto points, which is precisely what the DPJ means to do. This goal explains why the DPJ is so adamant about including SDPJ and PNP party leaders in the cabinet, so ensure that they are at the heart of the policymaking process. Decisions made by the cabinet will be that much stronger if the leaders of the smaller parties have signed on to them from the beginning.

It is also why the DPJ's leadership is trying to crack down on contact between bureaucrats and backbenchers. There is more than a whiff of disorder coming from the DPJ as it prepares to move into government — self-styled transition teams have contacted ministries for documents, prompting warnings from the DPJ leadership to its parliamentarians to exercise self-restraint when it comes to putting in requests to ministries. (The party has also instructed its newly elected backbenchers to exercise discretion in their contact with the media.) A certain amount of disorder is to be expected as the DPJ transitions into government, but this kind of freelancing is precisely the kind of behavior that Ozawa as secretary-general will have to police.

There is another factor that Hatoyama will have to consider as he finalizes his cabinet picks. He must ensure the cabinet is representative of the various viewpoints within the DPJ — most notably he'll have to pick a member or two from the Maehara-Noda section of the party. These members ought to be included in the cabinet simply on the basis of their policy expertise, but including them in the cabinet also makes for good politics. Jiji implies that Ozawa wants them excluded, but even under Ozawa's leadership Maehara held party leadership posts. However he dealt with rivals in the past, Ozawa seems to understand the value in what Lyndon Johnson reportedly said of J. Edgar Hoover: "I would rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in." I would be surprised if Hatoyama didn't give posts to Noda and Maehara, or some other representative from their groups.

In any case, we should learn the composition of Hatoyama's cabinet soon enough — the major positions are expected to be confirmed Monday afternoon — although Hatoyama is giving few hints as to his thinking.

It bears noting that even as the public is skeptical of other portions of the DPJ's agenda, a Sankei poll found that 87% of respondents indicated their support for the DPJ's plans for restructuring the relationship between politicians and bureaucrats and altering the budgeting process. When it comes to the most important piece of the DPJ's manifesto, the Hatoyama government will have the public on its side.

Building the inner cabinet

In the transition plan released by the DPJ's committee to prepare for government in September 2003, the party stressed that in the first five days after winning a general election, the victorious DPJ would convene a transition team that would quickly put into place the rudiments of a new system for governing.

Critical to this new system would be the speedy appointment of senior cabinet ministers, which would mark the beginning of an "inner cabinet," a group close to the prime minister that would usher in top-down leadership in place of the consensual system that has given each cabinet member a veto over cabinet decisions.

After initially announcing that he would wait until after taking office to announce his cabinet, Hatoyama Yukio appears to have reverted to the party's transition plan, having indicated his choices for chief cabinet secretary and three senior cabinet posts in recent days. (None of these decisions is final, however; Hatoyama chided the press Friday for being hasty in reporting Hirano Hirofumi's appointment as final when the DPJ still needs to consult with its coalition partners. Hatoyama did say Saturday that final decisions will be made Monday.)

Nevertheless, it appears as if the idea of an inner cabinet will be important for understanding the workings of the incoming DPJ-led government. As I suggested yesterday, Hatoyama will not be a presidential prime minister; the executive power will ultimately rest in the hands of a small group that will include Hatoyama but also Okada Katsuya as foreign minister, Fujii Hirohisa as finance minister, and Kan Naoto as head of the national strategy office, serving concurrently as deputy prime minister and head of the DPJ's policy research council. Perhaps this inner cabinet will also include the cabinet members from the PNP and SDPJ.

Hatoyama will, in short, have plenty of help in running the cabinet. I think that this system will be an improvement over top-down leadership model in which decision-making ultimately depends on the prime minister. As both Kan and Okada are both respected among DPJ backbenchers, their involvement should also help guarantee support from the party's legislators.

Of course, the more critical factor in linking the cabinet executive with the legislators who will be expected to vote for the cabinet's legislation will be Ozawa Ichiro. Ozawa and Hatoyama met Saturday and concluded that as secretary-general not only will Ozawa be responsible for election strategy, but he will also be responsible for the DPJ's Diet strategy, Diet strategy being the link between executive and legislative functions. Ozawa will be assigning committee positions and appointing the party's Diet strategy chair. Ozawa appears determined to unify functions in his office that in the LDP have been divided among several officials, consolidating the LDP's many vetoes into one big veto.

As I've previously argued, the question is what Ozawa does with his veto. The media seems to have concluded that personal rule by Ozawa is inevitable, but I think it is an open question. Having Ozawa concentrate the party's various functions (including, critically, financing functions) in the office of the secretary-general could result in a much weaker party relative to the cabinet if Ozawa respects the will of the cabinet and uses his position to keep individual party members down. Acknowledging these concerns, Ozawa made clear that he will respect the will of the prime minister, but it is too early to say: we'll have to see how Ozawa acts once the DPJ takes power. And if Ozawa decides to question the government publicly, an inner cabinet that includes two DPJ heavyweights plus Hatoyama could be better placed to resist Ozawa, even with Fujii, an Ozawa confidante included in the inner cabinet.

If this policymaking system actually emerges once the DPJ takes power after 16 September, the result will be a much more streamlined system than LDP rule, with its numerous veto points and bottlenecks. With Ozawa in control of the party machinery, he should be in position to punish backbenchers for inappropriate contact with bureaucrats and other behavior that undermines the executive. With power concentrated in the hands of a small group of ministers, the cabinet should be able to carry on even if a minister or two gets captured by their ministries.

A report on Shin Hodo 2001 this morning warned that the DPJ's efforts to streamline and centralize the policymaking process — copying the British system of government — could result in what some have called Britain's "elected dictatorship." To bring the point home, the accompanying image was of Iraq in flames, the consequences of the "dictatorial" powers that enabled Tony Blair to join hands with George W. Bush and commit Britain to war in Iraq despite public opposition. Checks on power are important, but given that LDP government has been characterized by a surfeit of informal checks and balances resulting in policy paralysis, an elected dictatorship might not be such a bad thing for the moment.

Will Hatoyama be first among equals?

After appointing Ozawa Ichiro as the DPJ's secretary-general and Hirano Hirofumi as chief cabinet secretary, Hatoyama Yukio has announced his intended choices for other senior posts, none of which comes as a surprise.

Okada Katsuya, a former party leader and runner-up to Hatoyama in the May party leadership election, is the incoming prime minister's pick for the foreign ministry — although the pick has not been completely finalized. Kan Naoto, another DPJ founder and along with Ozawa and Hatoyama a member of the troika that ran the party under Ozawa, is Hatoyama's choice to head the national strategy office. Fujii Hirohisa, a former finance minister who I pegged as the likeliest and best choice to return to the finance ministry, is being finalized as the appointee.

It is hard to disagree with these assignments. Okada, whose foreign policy views are more or less consistent with the DPJ's foreign policy consensus, is nevertheless a good pick, in that Okada should be able to speak to Washington in ways that ease whatever concerns the US has about a DPJ government's approach to the alliance. Earlier this year Okada articulated a vision for an alliance less centered on security policy, a message consistent with the party's manifesto and Hatoyama's own desires — the difference being that I think Okada has been able to articulate that message better than other DPJ politicians. Okada is a reassuring pick for the foreign ministry. He should be acceptable to the party's right wing, in that Okada is more likely to give their ideas a hearing, but he should be acceptable to the rest of the party as well, in that his foreign policy vision is markedly less hawkish than the right wing (and that he is independent from Ozawa).

Meanwhile, appointing Kan to head up the new national strategy office could be inspired decision, not only because Kan, a former health minister who became famous for taking the ministry's bureaucrats over a tainted blood scandal, has increasingly emerged as the party's most eloquent spokesman regarding administrative reform (see this post) but because Kan could keep the NSO's power in check. Hatoyama said that in order to raise the stature of the NSO he wanted to make its head an important cabinet member — appointing Kan certainly qualifies, but Kan has expressed a belief in the importance of cabinet government, government by appointed ministers, not by a cell of sub-ministerial officials like the NSO. Under Kan's leadership the NSO could become less a superministry responsible for coordinating the activities of ministers and more an advisory body to assist cabinet ministers as they attempt to wrest power from ministry officials. The difference is important: the former model would introduce a new, less accountable veto player into the cabinet, while the latter would support the goal of strengthening the cabinet's collective leadership of the government, while serving the goals articulated by sitting ministers. The point is that the NSO, still a wholly unknown quantity, will be strongly influenced by its first head, and given Kan's well-stated views on cabinet government, his appointment is an encouraging sign that the office will not become a new, unaccountable power center within the government.

Finally, there is little to add to what I have previously written about the value of Fujii as finance minister. Fujii is pragmatic but in complete agreement with the party's administrative reform goals; he is a former finance ministry official who also served as finance minister in the first non-LDP government since 1955; he is close to Ozawa, but given his age and experience would not be Ozawa's puppet at the finance ministry. He will no doubt be at the center of the Hatoyama government, as various party leaders have suggested in recent weeks.

In light of these pending appointments, Hatoyama's appointment of Hirano as chief cabinet secretary makes a certain amount of sense. MTC is disappointed in the Hirano pick, but given that Hatoyama's cabinet will clearly be packed with officials independent of Hatoyama, Hirano will be the one Hatoyama confidante in senior cabinet position, one with a reputation as a troubleshooter and a political crisis manager. Hirano will undoubtedly be overshadowed by Okada, Kan, and Fujii, who have standing of their own in the DPJ and considerable policy expertise, meaning that he will undoubtedly play a smaller policy role — but that his role as, in MTC's words, "traffic cop for the Cabinet" he will be a key adviser for the incoming prime minister as he tries to command a cabinet full of heavyweights.

That is the picture that emerges from these appointments. Hatoyama will be the prime minister, the face of the government, the man who attends the summits, but in practice the Hatoyama government may be characterized by collective leadership, with cabinet ministers being relatively strong and policy decisions resulting more from deliberation among the cabinet's ministers than from decisions handed down by the prime minister. As prime minister Hatoyama may have the final say, but it seems unlikely that he will exercise presidential-style leadership — rather he will be first among equals in a powerful cabinet.

The DPJ begins work on regime change

In a remarkable coincidence, the day after the DPJ's victory in the general election — and the day the DPJ began its transition in earnest — was the same day that ministries and agencies submitted their spending requests to the ministry of finance for the Fiscal 2010 general account budget.

The requests totaled roughly 92.13 trillion yen, a 3.58 trillion yen increase over the 2009 general account budget, making it the first over 90 trillion yen. Of the total, 52.67 trillion yen are general expenditures, with most of the remainder going to servicing Japan's national debt and regional subsidies.

Tango Yasutake, the finance ministry's administrative vice minister, stressed the ministry's desire to complete the budget within the calendar year, as is customary. The reason for Tango's emphasizing the ministry's desire is of course because the DPJ, still a few weeks from taking power, wants to halt the process immediately due to its desire to rearrange the budget completely, for the sake of introducing political leadership into the budgeting process and ensuring that programs from the DPJ's manifesto are included in a DPJ government's first budget as per the timeline included in the manifesto.

DPJ leader Hatoyama Yukio has stressed that the DPJ wants to change the budget completely, as the budget does not reflect its desires whatsoever. Apparently Kawamura Takeo, the outgoing chief cabinet secretary, did not get the message sent by the Japanese people on Sunday: Kawamura said Tuesday that because the requests include measures related to economic stimulus, the DPJ should give serious consideration to the requests as they stand. His colleagues also seemed to miss the point of Sunday's election. Ishiba Shigeru, the outgoing agriculture minister, and Kaneko Kazuyoshi, the outgoing transport minister, used the occasion of the post-election cabinet meeting Tuesday to criticize DPJ programs and demand that the DPJ leave programs untouched.

This is the first battle in the DPJ's fight to change how Japan is governed, and it should win: Asahi reports that the finance ministry is trying to exclude obligatory organizational expenses from the DPJ's desire to reshape the budget in its image. Presumably that leaves plenty of room for the DPJ to fix the budget as it desires. In this fight, the timing of the election may have been fortuitous. The bureaucracy is now facing the DPJ fresh from the high of its historic victory, with possibilities for the new ruling party that presumably won't exist once the DPJ moves into government and gets bogged down in governing.

But at the same time, the process would go smoother if the DPJ were to assemble its cabinet lineup sooner rather than later. Despite earlier indications that a victorious DPJ would name the appointees for senior cabinet posts within the first week after a general election — as indicated in the transition plan which according to Asahi is more associated with Okada Katsuya than Hatoyama — Hatoyama said Monday that he would not name a handful of senior appointees before naming the entire cabinet. The whole cabinet will be named after Hatoyama is elected prime minister. It also seems that Hatoyama may be wavering on his desire to appoint only elected officials to leading cabinet posts as he realizes how inexperienced his own party's members are. I strongly disagree with the decision to delay filling the most senior positions early. The transition would presumably go more smoothly with the government's core in place immediately, with the ministers-in-waiting getting their own teams in place and beginning to meet with senior bureaucrats in the ministries. The transition period is critical for the Hatoyama government's proposed national strategy office, which will have a major role to play despite not existing yet. After all, the NSO will be responsible for remaking the budget along lines desired by the DPJ — a point reinforced by Hatoyama's comment that the posts of NSO chief and the finance minister will be stressed jointly. To smooth the transition, the NSO in particular ought to be staffed as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, the press continues to report that Fujii Hirohisa will have a central role in the new government and that he will likely be joined by Kan, Okada, and Naoshima Masayuki, currently the DPJ's policy chief. Again, why wait if it is increasingly clear who will be occupying the leading posts? Filling these positions now would also take a bit of pressure off of Hatoyama — and would help move from abstract, campaign-style pronouncements as in Hatoyama's press conference Monday.

The bureaucracy itself is making its preparations for its new political masters. Bureaucrats have already delivered copies of budget requests to the offices of DPJ incumbents. For the first time, Yomiuri reports, DPJ members' offices are being visited by bureaucrats, in droves, whether or not the Diet members are present. Meishi are being left in mailboxes by bureau chiefs and other officials at levels never encountered by many DPJ members.

But the battle lines are also being drawn. As I argued in my earlier post on the importance of budgeting for the DPJ (previously linked to in this post), the DPJ's battle for budgetary authority will be waged more with spending ministries than with the finance ministry. Chief among them will be the ministry of land, infrastructure, transport and tourism (MLITT — haven't since this acronym, but why not?) and the ministry of agriculture, forestry, and fisheries (MAFF), the ministries with the most to lose from the DPJ's economy drive. Naturally MLITT's budget request was just about at the budgetary ceiling set by the CEFP. It appears that while MLITT has suggested that it might be open to revising its request, the ministry and the DPJ could clash over the construction of Yanba dam in Gunma prefecture and Kawabegawa Dam in Kumamoto — the DPJ called for the cancellation of both projects in its manifesto, meaning that the DPJ will fight that much harder to ensure that they are expunged from the budget. The DPJ's goal is cut 1.3 trillion yen in public works over four years (which, incidentally, shows how much Japan has already cut public works).

MAFF's request, meanwhile, was a 15% increase over last year's budget, an increase that includes a 19% increase in the ministry's public works spending.

MLITT, having shown conciliatory signs to the DPJ and having become accustomed to shrinking budgets, may find a way to accommodate itself to the new regime. Taniguchi Hiroaki, its administrative vice minister, requested a meeting with Hatoyama, a bit later than his colleagues in the leading ministries but still encouraging. Indeed, the ministry has announced that from 11 September it will freeze bidding on the Yanba dam, at least temporarily. The ministry still intends to argue for the dam, for which funds have already been dispersed to neighboring prefectures, but the DPJ probably has the upper hand.

The big fight will be with MAFF, which is truly threatened by the DPJ's income support plan and whose adminstrative vice minister has already traded words with the DPJ.

The DPJ could not have asked for a better start to its rule than to have bureaucrats dispirited and conscious of the fact that for now opposing the DPJ means opposing a public already ill-disposed to the bureaucracy, a public that whatever its doubts about the DPJ's manifesto is perhaps most sympathetic to the idea of political rule. It may be the case that neither side wants a fight for now, the DPJ because to wage open war on the bureaucracy would hinder its ability to get anything done, bureaucrats because for the moment a fight with the DPJ is a fight that they are sure to lose in the court of public opinion.

For more on the possibilities of genuine administrative reform, I recommend this essay by Karel van Wolferen, who is aware of the obstacles facing the DPJ without dismissing the possibility that the DPJ will succeed. I particularly like this sentence: "But my impression is that the individuals of the inner core of the party are deadly serious about what must be done to turn their country into what one of them, the most senior and most experienced Ozawa Ichiro, has in his writing called a 'normal country'."

Exactly so. The DPJ means what it said during the campaign, and is taking the first steps towards a new system of governance.

Discussing the DPJ's administrative plans on CNBC

Bright and early this morning, I somehow managed to speak coherently (I think?) about the DPJ's plans for the government.

Meet Japan's Democrats

The votes have been counted, and unsurprisingly the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) has emerged victorious, becoming the first party other than the LDP to wield a majority in Japan's House of Representatives since the LDP was created in 1955.

But despite its victory, the DPJ is poorly understood even by Japanese. So it is worth asking, who are Japan's Democrats?

In this post, I will try to address some common misunderstandings about the DPJ, many of which will undoubtedly be repeated as Japan and the world consider the implications of Japan's historic change of government.

Origins: The DPJ is the successor to a party now known as the former DPJ. The former DPJ was launched in 1996 by members of the former Japan Socialist Party (JSP; now the Social Democratic Party of Japan) and Sakigake, one of the microparties that participated in the non-LDP coalition that held power from 1993-1994. Both parties had joined in coalition with the LDP in 1994, and the founders of the DPJ feared the electoral consequences of that decision. Among those founders were Hatoyama Yukio, a member of Sakigake who had been deputy chief cabinet secretary in the Hosokawa government, Yokomichi Takahiro, a onetime JSP Diet member who had served three terms as Hokkaido's governor before returning to the Diet as a DPJ member in 1996, and Kan Naoto, who at the time became well known for his service as health minister dealing with the AIDS-tainted blood scandal, as well as Hatoyama Kunio, Yukio's brother.

One thing that becomes apparent from looking at the party's basic principles is the similarity to the platform upon which the new DPJ was elected in 2009. It is also worth noting the similarities between this document and Hatoyama Yukio's recent essay in VOICE, including the inclusion of certain phrases ("bottom-up democracy of co-existence and self-reliance," "fraternity," etc.). As I noted when Hatoyama was elected DPJ leader in May, the former DPJ was very much a Hatoyama family affair, to the point of its founding depending on the Hatoyama family fortune.

But the party was transformed from a Hatoyama New Party to the party now set to govern Japan through several waves of new arrivals to the party. In 1998, the dissolution of Ozawa Ichiro's New Frontier Party led to the creation first of a handful of tiny parties plus Ozawa's Liberal Party, and then to the union of the former DPJ and the NFP successor parties with the exception of the Liberal Party. The party's principles at its founding in 1998 can be clearly recognized in the party's 2009 election manifesto: decentralization, administrative reform, budgetary reform, political reform in the interest of a more transparent and bottom-up democracy, a certain skepticism with neo-liberalism, a stress on a social safety net suited for an age marked by an aging, shrinking population, a foreign policy that stressed the UN, cooperation with the US in other areas (i.e., non-security), and closer ties with Asian countries, and a security policy that largely retained cold war constraints and sought more regional security multilateralism.

The DPJ was further transformed when the party merged with Ozawa Ichiro's Liberal Party, a move opposed vociferously by some DPJ members, most notably Edano Yukio. The most notable consequence of the merger, of course, was that it brought Ozawa into the party, which was subsequently reshaped by Ozawa, although the party went through three leaders, faced a disastrous defeat in 2005, and went through an embarrassing scandal in 2006 that nearly broke the reeling party.

Ozawa almost single-handedly transformed the DPJ into the party capable of driving the LDP from power. He selected candidates, trained them, honed the party's message to reach voters in the provinces, and then tirelessly traveled the country to take the DPJ's message to the people and lend his support to his candidates. Hatoyama may be the face of the victory and the DPJ's first prime minister, but the DPJ's victory is Ozawa's victory.

A divided party?: Given the manner in which the DPJ developed, it is common to look at the DPJ and see a divided party. After all, it has former DPJ members and former JSP members in its ranks.

But to look at those two extremes and assume an irreconcilably divided party is mistaken, not least because it ignores the enormous mass between the two.

The DPJ that went into the 2009 campaign had, between the upper and lower houses, sixteen former JSP members (two who left the party after it had become the SDPJ) and twenty former LDP members. Of the latter, most of these members left the LDP in 1993. Most of the former Socialists have been in the DPJ since the creation of the former DPJ in 1996. Do the years spent away from their former parties count for nothing? This question applies doubly so to leaders like Ozawa and Hatoyama. Ozawa may have once been a rising star, but why do his years in the wilderness count for nothing?

Often ignored in accounts of the DPJ are the 134 members (before Sunday) who have spent their entire careers within the DPJ, a number that will of course swell thanks to the DPJ's overwhelming victory. The point is that these party members are dedicated to the party's ideas as outlined above and as translated into policy form in the party's 2009 manifesto.

There will inevitably be rifts as the party fills in the details surrounding its policies once in power, but differences in opinion along these lines are normal.

Another manner in which the DPJ is more united, at least compared to the LDP, is in its internal structure. The DPJ does not have the sprawling policymaking organization that is the LDP's policy research council. It has been a considerably more top-down organization than the LDP and customarily has had collective leadership, starting with Hatoyama and Kan at the party's birth and continuing onward through to the Ozawa-Hatoyama-Kan troika and the party's Next Cabinet, which early in the DPJ's existence replaced the general council (which in the LDP exerts a veto over the cabinet). Successful administrative reform will depend on the DPJ's bringing this tradition of top-down, collective leadership into government.

Identical to the LDP?: Another common argument about the DPJ is that it is nothing more than a pale imitation of the LDP. There are a couple ways to address this argument.

First, if this is in fact the case, so what? In most if not all developed democracies, intense ideological divides have narrowed so that center-left and center-right parties have moved ever closer and now compete more on the basis of administrative competence and corruption than on profound clashes based on policy or conforming to class cleavages. Why should Japan be any different?

But while the DPJ and the LDP differed largely on questions of how to pay for programs that neither side questioned in principle, there is one area in which the two parties differed radically: administrative reform. The LDP has long talked about administrative reform, but has only haltingly followed through on its rhetoric. The DPJ, however, has made clear that its first and most important order of business is shifting the balance of power between politicians and bureaucrats in favor of politicians in the cabinet, especially when it comes to budgeting. If the DPJ delivers on its proposals — and given its mandate, it is hard to see how it will fail to make at least some progress — it will be in a position to make more substantial policy changes.

Left wing?: Others argue that far from being identical to the LDP, the DPJ is actually a radical left wing party. There is little evidence to support this argument. Indeed, it is barely worth addressing. No party led by Ozawa Ichiro for three years, and before that Maehara Seiji, merits the label left wing.

Muddled policy: There is, of course, some truth to this argument, especially as far as the party's economic growth strategy is concerned. Others in Washington argue that the DPJ's position on foreign policy is muddled. I would be more concerned about the former than the latter. As I wrote last week, the DPJ is more united on foreign policy questions than often assumed, and on the realignment of US forces, the foreign policy issue most likely to be taken up by the Hatoyama government early on, the party is almost completely in agreement in opposition to the 2006 roadmap.

But while there are many remaining questions about how the DPJ will get Japan's economy growing again and fix the government's finances — new bond issues? dollar reserves? tax reform? — the DPJ will answer these questions soon.

What we can be sure about is that the biggest pieces of the DPJ's manifesto — child allowances, income support for farmers, free public high schools, tollfree national expressways — will be assigned high priority by the new government. And on administrative reform, the party's position is clear: it will transform the balance of power within the government. The DPJ may make some tactical compromises as it pursues a new policymaking process, but it will make it a top priority.

There are unanswered questions about a DPJ government, one of the biggest being a triumphant Ozawa Ichiro's role in the new administration. But the party will enjoy a honeymoon and it has a huge majority with which to work. The Japanese public has certainly provided the DPJ with the perfect tool with which to implement its agenda.

The budget is the key to regime change

In their final appeals to Japanese voters, Kan Naoto and other DPJ leaders laid particular stress on the budget.

Speaking in Tokyo on Saturday, Kan said, "True regime change is politicians who have received the trust of the people restoring the right to formulate budgets to the people." Okada Katsuya, the DPJ's secretary-general, delivered the same message in Gifu Saturday. "We will completely review and remake the budget," he said. "We will review from a zero base that severs existing obligations."

Perhaps it seems strange that on the eve of the general election that may deliver the DPJ into power for the first time, its leaders are speaking of the "right of formulating budgets" and "zero-based budgeting."

It shouldn't. After all, the power to determine how a nation's wealth is spent and distributed — inherent in the national budget — has been at the center of political conflicts for centuries since the rise of the modern state. Appropriately considering that Kan and other DPJ politicians are looking to create a proper Westminster system on Japan's shores, the battle over the budget was particularly central to Britain's political development, from the struggles of the seventeenth century, Britain's "century of revolution," to the battle over the "People's Budget" roughly a century ago, when the Asquith government fought over the House of Lords over a budget that included redistributory measures, especially pensions, and would be financed by tax increases on the wealthy.

When Kan speaks of the right to formulate budgets, he is speaking of something fundamental to democracy: that the people's representatives should have the power to decide how the public's money is spent and that their decisions should be transparent so that the people can decide whether they approve of how their representatives are using the public's wealth. The problem is not that politicians have been uninvolved in budgeting under LDP rule, but that their involvement was the product of collusion between elected representatives and bureaucrats who saw cooperation with certain politicians — the LDP's zoku giin (policy tribesmen) — making deals behind closed doors to benefit particular groups and constituents at the expense of the whole. The opacity of the budgeting process was compounded by the existence of special accounts in addition to the general budget, funds that were used with little or no public oversight. It was for this reason that when I spoke with one of the DPJ's rising stars, a retired finance ministry official, in January he stressed that the DPJ cannot be sure of how it will pay for all of its promises because it cannot be sure of how much money is sitting in special accounts the contents of which have not been made available to the DPJ, let alone the public at large.

Accordingly, while some doubt that anything will change with a DPJ victory, if the DPJ succeeds at making the budgeting process even more top-down and subject to political control than it became as a result of the Hashimoto reforms of the late 1990s (the extent to which these reforms transformed the budgeting process are open for debate), it will have truly changed Japan. Restoring the cabinet's constitutional prerogative to formulate the budget is, after all, the goal of the party's plans for a national strategy office. Administrative reform has arguably been one of the DPJ's core principles since the first DPJ was created in 1996 — the above statements and others reveal that for the DPJ administrative reform that does not include reform of the budgeting process is incomplete.

Changing the budgeting process, often construed as entailing a fight with the ministry of finance, may in fact entail more significant battles with the ministries responsible for spending the money rather than the ministry allocating it. Under LDP rule, spending ministries like the agriculture ministry, the former construction ministry, and the health, labor, and welfare ministry have been the primary administrative beneficiaries of opaque budgeting — it was not accidental that the most powerful policy tribes were connected to these policy areas. All of these ministries have suffered from budget cuts over the past decade, which will presumably make them even more resistant to changes proposed by the DPJ: it is their budgets that the DPJ would like to redirect in order to pay for programs directed at the public's main concerns.

Cutting these budgets will take a certain ruthlessness on the part of a DPJ government. Naturally the LDP will find ways to put a human face on budget cuts. Presumably manga artist Satonaka Machiko's appeal on behalf of the 11.7 billion yen "national media arts center" lampooned as Aso Taro's "Manga cafe" by the DPJ will not be the last such appeal if the DPJ wins Sunday. Masuzoe Yoichi, Aso's minister of health, labor, and welfare and potentially Aso's successor as LDP leader, warned that the DPJ's policy of rearranging the budget could jeopardize important programs in his ministry to combat swine flu and unemployment, which strikes me as fearmongering on Masuzoe's part, but it does suggest that after an electoral defeat the LDP will still find ways to challenge the DPJ on this question of remaking the budget.

But ultimately giving politicians in the cabinet more power over the budget is but a first step to moving Japan in a new direction. Having claimed budgetary authority, the government will then have to find a way to balance among the DPJ's three goals of fixing Japan's finances, building a proper social safety net, and finding a way to get Japanese households and companies channeling their cash holdings into profitable investment and consumption.

In most areas the DPJ may not signal a radical departure from the LDP — most areas except for the question of who should make Japan's budgets. And it is that difference which makes all the difference. If the DPJ implements its plans for a strengthened cabinet, it will make a radical departure from LDP rule, and clear the way for further policy changes.

The DPJ continues to reveal its plans for government

While the DPJ may have a public relations problem, the party has continued to show during the days leading up to the general election that it is focused on ensuring a smooth transition to power in the likely event that it wins, while at the same time taking the first steps to reorganizing the policymaking process to privilege the cabinet at the expense of the bureaucracy.

In particular, more details are emerging regarding the national strategy office that is at the center of the DPJ's plans for empowering the cabinet. The party has confirmed that not only will the director of the office be a member of the cabinet, but that the head of the DPJ's policy research council will serve concurrently at policy chief and head of the NSO. And Mainichi suggests that the post will be equivalent to a deputy prime minister. The goal, of course, is to forestall the creation of a policymaking process in which ruling party organs wield veto power over the cabinet's decisions — a central feature of LDP rule. How will a DPJ create the new office as it takes power, seeing as how it has no legal standing, and seeing as how the DPJ wants the NSO to play a leading rule in budgeting? It appears that the DPJ plans to create the office as an informal planning cell coming into existence concurrently with the Hatoyama cabinet, which will then submit legislation officially creating the NSO (and, it seems, dissolving the Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy, whose functions it will subsume). Jiji's report also suggests that the office will have thirty members drawn from the Diet, the private sector, and the bureaucracy.

Given the party's emphasis on increasing the role of the cabinet in budgeting, moving at least some distance in the direction of zero-based budgeting — recently stressed by Okada Katsuya in a campaign appearance in Tokyo — moving quickly on the NSO will be crucial to the early success of a DPJ government. I hope that they've already assembled a wish list for the NSO's thirty members and have put out feelers to those outside the party.

The DPJ has also confirmed that decisions regarding sub-cabinet appointees will be made by cabinet ministers themselves, instead of by party officials. (Recall that distributing sub-cabinet posts is one of the few remaining functions left to the LDP's factions.) The goal seems to be the creation of policy teams at each ministry, with the minister and sub-ministers working together to impose the cabinet's will. Incidentally, this policy signals at least two important changes. First, it suggests that the DPJ's changes to the policymaking process involve more than just strengthening the prime minister. By bolstering the positions of individual ministers, the cabinet as a whole will be stronger. Second, by giving ministers the power to select their political subordinates, it should introduce factors other than age and faction into the distribution of posts. After all, given that the DPJ has young former bureaucrats in its ranks, why should they be prevented from holding sub-cabinet posts due to their lack of seniority? Presumably this freedom to dispense with seniority is one advantage of the relative youth of DPJ candidates.

Another plan being floated by the DPJ is increasing the number of prime minister's secretaries to six, with one being a Diet member and the remaining five being bureaucrats. The party would prefer more than one political appointee, but due to the Diet law's limit on the number of Diet members who can serve concurrently in government, Hatoyama will depend on bureaucrats at his side until the law can be revised.

Finally, if the DPJ wins a decisive victory Sunday, its transition team will begin work on Monday.

Far from playing the naïve ingenue, the DPJ is clearly serious about governing and is doing all the right things to ensure a framework will be in place by the time the Diet meets to elect a new prime minister.