The DPJ unveils its manifesto (part one)

At an event at the Hotel New Otani in Tokyo Monday evening the DPJ released its 2009 general election manifesto to the public.

Running to twenty-four pages, the manifesto is centered around five major areas: (1) cutting waste (essentially political and administrative reform); (2) child care and education; (3) pensions and health care; (4) regionalization; and (5) employment and the economy. After providing general outlines of the party's plans in each of these areas, it provides details about fifty-five specific proposals in these five areas, as well as in the areas of consumer and human rights, and foreign policy. While not all of these policy descriptions go into great detail — many are quite vague — the DPJ has provided a concrete plan for how it will go about governing should it win next month's general election. Its priorities are clear and reflect the public's priorities (at least the public's priorities as repeatedly expressed in public opinion polls). There are shortcomings: foreign policy, for example, is a particular weakness, despite the realism of recent remarks by the party's leaders.

Cutting waste: I am glad that the DPJ gave this section pride of place in the manifesto, because it is the most radical portion of their agenda. As far as I'm concerned, the various spending programs that have received much of the attention from the press and the LDP are bread and circuses compared with the party's plans for administrative reform. The title of "cutting waste" isn't mistaken, because the goal of changing how Japan is governed to shift responsibility for the nation's finances from unelected bureaucrats to elected officials serving in the cabinet (as written in Article 73 of the Japanese Constitution). Accordingly, as the heading in the "cutting waste" section proclaims, "Completely rearranging the country's 207 trillion yen general budget."

To do that, the DPJ proposes to ban the practice of amakudari completely, simultaneously reforming public and semi-public corporations and the special accounts that support them; cutting personnel costs by twenty percent (which will be done in part by moving some public services to local governments); making the government contracting process transparent; and reviewing how politicians and bureaucrats interact, which includes the party's proposal to appoint more than 100 ruling party members to cabinet and sub-cabinet posts and provisions for greater transparency in how politicians and bureaucrats interact (this proposal is a bit too vague for me). Also included in this section are proposals for political reform, including a plan to cut the number of proportional seats by 80, which would reduce the number of PR seats to 100 and the total number of lower house seats to 400. This plan would presumably be fiercely resisted by smaller parties in coalition with the DPJ. The DPJ also proposes to ban corporate contributions and fundraising party ticket purchases from companies with contracts with the national government and local governments over 100 million yen.

Finally, and most importantly, the DPJ alludes to making the budgeting process transparent. The manifesto does not include the proposal — included in the party's 300-day transition plan and discussed by Kan Naoto in his Chuo Koron essay (discussed here) — to move budgeting authority to the cabinet entirely, giving elected officials responsibility for collating requests and compiling a national budget. Without a shift of this sort, the DPJ will be hard-pressed to rearrange the general budget completely as it promises.

Complementing this plan for government is the party's plan for internal governance, which is not included in the manifesto but without which the DPJ will not be able to make much headway in wresting power from the bureaucracy. Briefly, having studied LDP rule, it is essential for a DPJ government to control the activities of its members and to disable the party's internal organs. DPJ backbenchers must not be able to undermine the cabinet's plans as outlined in this manifesto. Their responsibility, if not serving in an administrative position, will be to show up for votes and vote in the manner ordered by the government. Under Ozawa Ichiro's leadership the DPJ was criticized for being a "dictatorship:" given the anarchy that has characterized the internal politics of the LDP in recent years, a dose of intra-party dictatorship might not be such a bad thing, especially if the DPJ is going to have to manage complex coalition partnerships. The party has already taken steps in this direction, starting with the decision made a decade ago to replace the party general council with a shadow cabinet. A DPJ-led cabinet would also be strengthened by the weakness of the party's policy research council, which, thanks to the relative lack of information flowing from the bureaucracy until fairly recently, has been under-institutionalized and dependent on outside expertise.

The party's policymaking role would be further diminished by the party's plans for a "national strategy office" under the direct control of the prime minister. While it was not directly referenced in the manifesto, should the DPJ take power this office will be an important actor in coordinating the DPJ's plans for the transition from bureaucratic to political rule. The office will be responsible for compiling the budget and drafting foreign policy documents. Its staff will include as many civilians as bureaucrats and its head will have ministerial rank (and will likely be occupied by the head of the policy research council). Hatoyama Yukio has further stressed that the creation of the national strategy office would contribute to undermining the power of the administrative vice ministers' council, which Hatoyama wants to abolish outright. Hatoyama should probably listen to Kan — one of the few DPJ leaders with ministerial experience — who, while noting the pernicious influence of the council, acknowledged that it may be beyond the power of the government to abolish it, as it could very easily reemerge under a different name. In Chuo Koron, Kan suggested that it might be better to include it in the policy process by introducing political appointees into the meetings. Ultimately the DPJ may be better off developing the power of cabinet institutions instead of combating the administrative vice ministers directly. If a DPJ government could credibly establish a top-down policymaking process the administrative vice ministers' council may simply wither away.

I am not under the illusion that the DPJ will be able to write all of its administrative reform proposals into law. I have doubts about various proposals included in this section of the manifesto (will the DPJ really be able to send more than 100 political appointees into the ministries? what does the DPJ plan to do with the retiring bureaucrats cast into a labor market still unaccustomed to hiring workers mid-career?). But I do think that the DPJ is aware of the challenge it faces in implementing this portion of its agenda — and knows that building a Westminster system, in which politicians in the cabinet wield administrative power in full view of the public, is critical to making progress in tackling the other policy areas in the party's agenda.

(Part two here.)

Can the LDP — or anyone — eradicate amakudari?

The Aso government, looking to hasten the passage of the FY2009 budget (the third stage of Prime Minister Aso's plan to overcome the recession), has promised to accelerate the timetable for introducing the ban on the practice of amakudari and the related practice of watari, whereby a retired bureaucrat wanders to other employers who might have inappropriate ties with his former ministry. The government will concurrently hasten the creation of a new organization that will help retiring bureaucrats find jobs.

Clearly Mr. Aso is trying to head off criticism from multiple directions: reformists within the LDP, former LDP administrative reform czar Watanabe Yoshimi, and the DPJ.

Economist Ikeda Nobuo dismisses as "make believe" the idea that the government can simply decree an end to amakudari.

Ikeda makes the astute point that one cannot simply decree the end of amakudari, because the problem is intertwined with a range of problems relating to the nature of the bureaucracy and the labor market. How, he wonders, are fifty-something ex-bureaucrats — despite their management experience and (presumably) advanced degrees — supposed to find jobs on their own in the labor market as it exists today? What company is hiring senior managers in their fifties, unless it entails providing a sinecure in exchange for the ex-bureaucrat's connections and knowledge? At the same time, both the LDP and the DPJ are on record as wanting to cut waste, which in practice means dissolving the semigovernmental corporations that absorb a good number of ex-bureaucrats. If the private sector cannot gainfully employ them, and if there are fewer semi-public or public sector jobs available, where exactly will these still-useful ex-bureaucrats go? Foreign companies?

One way to ease the pressure on the system is by having more bureaucrats retire earlier. Takahashi Yoichi, formerly of the finance ministry and now one of its biggest critics, and Eda Kenji, formerly of METI and now an independent Diet member collaborating with Mr. Watanabe, have been promoting precisely that, with their 脱藩官僚会 (dappan kanryo kai). Based on the example of the bakumatsu, when samurai voluntarily left the service of their daimyo, their idea is to encourage bureaucrats to retire early and put their policy expertise to work for the whole of Japan, as a means of encouraging the transfer of power away from the bureaucracy. Incidentally, Mr. Eda calls for the same combination of cutting waste and banning amakudari, meaning he better get to work recruiting dappan kanryo. (He explains the group here.) Clearly, however, these changes will not be enough. It may take the bureaucracy introducing merit-based promotions, which in turn will require that incoming bureaucrats receive more education before entering their ministries instead of devoting the first several years of their careers to training.

Of course, there is a whole different set of problems assuming it were even possible for companies to hire mid-career ex-bureaucrats as managers with ease. The US government is, in a sense, engaged in an ongoing struggle to prevent retired civil servants from abusing their former positions. A whole range of institutions — departmental inspectors general, the government accountability office (GAO), the Justice Department's public integrity section, the office of government ethics, and so on — is engaged in the hard work of investigating and punishing abuses of office by current and former government employees.

The laws are fairly clear. Former employees are legally proscribed from representing a third party with government agencies on any matter in which involvement was "personal and substantial." Some high level officials are subject to a "cooling off" period, a one-year period during which any attempt to contact their former employers with "the intent to influence" an official decision is forbidden. "Very senior" employees are banned from contacting senior executive branch officials and employees of their former agency for a year. Naturally it is worth asking what happens after the cooling off period, because Japan also has laws mandating cooling off periods. The difference, it seems, is not a matter of law, but a matter of enforcement.

As the Global Integrity Report on the US found, the US government has more work to do on policing ties between former bureaucrats and their employers. But the point is not that the US is perfect — far from it. Rather, the US government has made a point of trying to root out this behavior. It has developed a number of organizations with the explicit purpose of keeping these corrupt ties in check. And despite that, it still has a hard time policing ties between retired civil servants and their former agencies, especially, I would argue, in matters of defense (Eisenhower's defense-industrial complex).

In other words, it is not enough to declare amakudari at an end and offer to assist retiring bureaucrats with finding new employment. Is this government prepared to create new institutions to police ex-bureaucrats and the government's ministries and agencies? Is it ready to protect whistleblowers? Is it prepared to create and nurture a whole new agency whose explicit purpose is policing the rest of the bureaucracy? Uprooting amakudari will require a government-wide commitment to eradicating the practice. It will also require Diet oversight.

Naturally the same challenges apply for the DPJ, which has made cutting waste its top promise for the next general election.

Unlike Nakagawa Hidenao, who continues to impugn the DPJ's reformist credentials based on the slightest of pretenses, I believe the DPJ is serious about administrative reform. I recently talked for an hour with Nagatsuma Akira, the man responsible for exposing the pensions scandal and a currently a member of the DPJ's "Next Cabinet" as minister responsible for pensions. Mr. Nagatsuma is passionate about administrative reform, seeing it, correctly in my view, as essential for democracy. He is positively bursting with ideas for reform., with a zeal unmatched by any Japanese politician I have ever met. He believes in the importance of accountability. His zeal, I think, is representative of how the DPJ will govern.

But zeal or no zeal, the DPJ will still have to find a way to navigate through this treacherous minefield, with the additional challenge of the party's ties with public-sector unions. I still have hope for the DPJ, but I am not blind to the difficulties it faces on this fundamental issue.

For now, simply declaring an end to amakudari is nothing more than a publicity stunt. (Ikeda, more generous than I, calls it a first step, which I suppose is true but that presumes that this government is prepared to take the aforementioned next steps.)