The Kan system

The Kan government has formed, having retained eleven ministers from the Hatoyama government (as expected). Among the new faces in Kan's cabinet of "irregular forces" are Noda Yoshihko (finance), Yamada Masahiko (agriculture), Arai Satoshi (national strategy), Genba Kōichirō (administrative reform), and, perhaps most prominently, Renhō (government revitalization).

Looking at the transition from the Hatoyama-Ozawa regime to the new DPJ cabinet, Michael Cucek reviews the history of the DPJ's coming to power and the nature of the Ozawa's strategy and concludes that under Kan, "the DPJ, the classical DPJ, is back."

It is hard to disagree. Indeed, the haste with which Kan Naoto and his "Seven Magistrate" deputies have tried to break with Ozawa — Kan's telling the former secretary-general to keep quiet, new DPJ election chief Azumi Jun's decision to review Ozawa's strategy of running two candidates in three-seat districts — are surely just the beginning of what will be weeks and months of distancing the party from Ozawa. More than that, Kan's emphasis on grassroots politics, the basis for Kan's calling his cabinet a "cabinet of irregulars" (or commandos), stands in marked contrast to Ozawa's courtship of the same interest groups that had long sustained the LDP in power.

What does this "classic" approach mean for the DPJ's plans to build a top-down policymaking process?

Perhaps the biggest change is that under Kan and DPJ secretary-general Edano Yukio the party will undo the concentration of power in the office of the secretary-general that occurred under Ozawa. Most notably the party has accepted the restoration of the policy research council, the primary demand of the reform movement that emerged earlier this year.

The new PRC, however, will look nothing like the LDP's PRC, not least because there is no indication that Kan will roll back the restrictions on contact between backbenchers and bureaucrats that the Hatoyama government promulgated upon taking power. Genba, the minister for public service reform, will serve simultaneously in the cabinet and as the PRC chair. Genba himself said in his first press conference that the "former PRC" is not being restored, that the new PRC will not pose a threat to the government's plans to unify policymaking in the cabinet. Instead it appears, at least based on Genba's remarks, that the PRC will serve as a forum for two-way communication between cabinet and party. As a member of the cabinet, Genba's responsibilities will include explaining the government's policies to backbenchers in addition to facilitating debates about new policies among MPs. The principle of collective responsibility ought to restrain Genba from using his post to challenge the government: as a cabinet minister he is obligated to defend the government's decisions once they have been made.

The new PRC will enable backbenchers, especially first-term backbenchers, to participate in policy debates and perhaps generate new policy ideas — but there is no sense that it marks a return to bottom-up policymaking in which party members wield a veto over every government decision.

In addition to creating a new PRC that is directly linked to the cabinet, the Kan government will keep the new secretary-general closer to the government — literally. Edano may occupy an office within the Kantei. The result would be that the secretary-general would act more like a political adviser to the prime minister than the autonomous strategist that Ozawa had become, and, as Edano said in his initial remarks, would be responsible for defending the government's decision before the voting public. (The Kan-Edano relationship will invariably differ than the Hatoyama-Ozawa relationship not least because Kan will not be overshadowed by his secretary-general in the public's eye.)

The result is that under Kan the DPJ will try to replace a government in which the ruling party had fewer veto players but in which the party's one veto player was at least as powerful as the prime minister with a government in which the party may have more veto player but in which the prime minister is more powerful, more visible to the public, and more capable of controlling party officials. There will be more players involved in policy debates, but my sense is that Kan, with the help of Sengoku Yoshito, the new chief cabinet secretary, will not be reluctant to remind his subordinates of who is in charge of the government.

Of course, the question hanging over this new "un-Ozawa" system is whether Ozawa himself will accept it. Freed of formal responsibilities, Ozawa will now have the time to forge his political loyalists into an Ozawa faction should he want to, which would of course make life difficult for the Kan government. Inevitably the new regime will have to make its peace with Ozawa — or Ozawa will have to restrain himself from intervening in policymaking and political strategy.

Nevertheless, under Kan the DPJ has a prime minister who may be even more devoted to building a Westminster-style system than his predecessor. The DPJ may  have made some necessary concessions to the party's MPs, but the goal remains strengthening the role of the prime minister and the cabinet at the expense of bureaucrats and backbenchers.

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.

The DPJ and the bureaucracy continue their dance

Sankei has a long and must-read article on the obstacles facing a DPJ government in implementing its plans for reforming the policymaking process.

The article highlights divisions within the DPJ over how to proceed in reforming Japan's administration, especially budget-making authority. The pragmatism visible in other aspects of the DPJ's program is also visible in the party's approach to administrative reform of late.

The pragmatic view is that of party senior counselor Fujii Hirohisa, a former LDP member who left the party in 1993, followed Ozawa Ichiro through from the Japan Renewal Party to the New Frontier Party to the Liberal Party to the DPJ. He served as finance minister in the short-lived Hata cabinet. And before running for the upper house in 1977 as an LDP candidate he served in ministry of finance for twenty-years, rising to the position of budget examiner in the budget bureau. Accordingly, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that Fujii is opposed to suggestions that the DPJ might completely detach the budget bureau from the finance ministry and attach it to the cabinet (the party's 300-day transition plan refers to this idea).

Going as far as a 'national strategy office' is sufficient. We had better not fumble around by detaching the budget bureau from the finance ministry and creating a kind of budget office under the direct control of the prime minister. (Revising the laws) would take half a year, and in the meantime the government would break down.

There is a certain wisdom to Fujii's advice, at least as a DPJ government's first year in office goes. And it is worth listening to, for, as Sankei hints, Fujii could end up as finance minister despite not standing for reelection this year. Indeed, as a MOF OB (and Ozawa confidante) Fujii probably has the inside track on the finance portfolio.

Should the DPJ win this month, winning an absolute majority in the 2010 upper house election has to become its top priority. Any steps that interfere with the government's ability to move legislation that will enable the DPJ to stand before the voters in 2010 having made some progress in implementing its manifesto is detrimental to the goal of ensuring that a DPJ government survives. Whether or not a battle over the budget bureau would actually paralyze the government, it is a risk that the DPJ will not be willing to run.

Accordingly, it is entirely possible that the DPJ will soft pedal administrative reform during its first year. The DPJ would, of course, pass legislation creating a national strategy office (henceforth NSO) during this year's extraordinary Diet session, but the NSO, intended to replace the Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy (CEFP) is not the radical change that relocating the budget bureau would be. At the same time, the DPJ appears to be looking for ways to build relationships with senior bureaucrats, a change in tune from calls for "loyalty tests" for senior ministry officials. The Sankei article notes that in addition to the meeting with Tango Yasutake, the administrative vice-minister of finance, mentioned in this post, senior officials from the MOF, MOFA, METI, and an unnamed fourth ministry met with senior DPJ Diet members in late July to discuss this year's supplemental budget and next year's budget. The finance ministry has also been meeting surreptitiously with Party President Hatoyama Yukio and Secretary-General Okada Katsuya. The impression I get is that both the DPJ and senior bureaucrats are eager to ensure a minimal level of continuity should the DPJ take power later this month.

I see no problem with this, at least as a short-term strategic decision. The bureaucracy's position of strength was not built in a year, and it will not be dismantled in a year. In the meantime, the DPJ will need allies in the bureaucracy, especially in order to limit the bureaucracy's ability to undermine the party's other policy programs. I do hope that budget authority is eventually wrested from the bureaucracy's hands, but I recognize that successful revolutions take time and usually involve the slow process of changing customs, norms, and ideas in addition to changing institutional structures. I do think Nakagawa Hidenao — who has been writing of the DPJ's "abandoning the 'abandoning Kasumigaseki' line" — is deeply unrealistic when he writes of the DPJ's shift to an "appeasement line" on administrative reform. Appeasement, when stripped of its negative connotations, often amounts to recognizing one's limitations in implementing a certain policy approach. Appeasement can go too far, of course, but for a DPJ possibly on the verge of taking power to look for ways to ameliorate the bureaucracy's concerns and possibly co-opt certain senior officials is prudent politics.

Interestingly, Machimura Nobutaka, Nakagawa's fellow Machimura faction member, criticized the DPJ's administrative reform plans in a way diametrically opposed to Nakagawa Wednesday: he argued that "political leadership" in the form desired by the DPJ would be "iron fisted."

At this point in time Japan could probably use some "iron-fisted" government, after years of the LDP's weak hand. In looking for ways to cooperate with the bureaucracy to achieve its goals, the DPJ may be coating its iron fist in velvet, at least during the first phase of its government.