Administrative reform in sight

Its fate uncertain after being introduced in the Diet, the government's administrative reform bill now looks set to pass both houses after the DPJ concluded an agreement with the LDP and Komeito on a compromise bill.

The bill, according to Asahi, will pass the HR's cabinet committee on Wednesday and the whole HR on Thursday.

The government made several important concessions to the DPJ. The bill will create a cabinet personnel bureau that will be responsible for personnel decisions (as opposed to the government's plan that permitted ministries and agencies to retain prime responsibility for personnel decisions). All contact between politicians and bureaucrats other than the those in the new class of officials responsible for relations between legislators and ministries will be recorded and made public — the DPJ was adamant on this point, and the government agreed. The DPJ failed to secure desired restrictions to prevent amakudari, as well as expanded labor rights for clerical officials, a clause desired by DPJ ally RENGO, Japan's largest trade union confederation.

There is little reason for the DPJ to be disappointed. While it did not get everything it wanted, it got more than enough concessions from the government to claim that progress is being made along lines desired by the DPJ. In a stroke it has illustrated that it is capable of playing a constructive role in the policy process and push for greater transparency and accountability in Japanese governance. The Fukuda government, meanwhile, sounds happy just to have agreed to something and to have a signature bill progressing to passage without having to use Article 59. Chief Cabinet Secretary Machimura declared, "The content has become considerably different from the original government bill, but we welcome the bill's passage."

Sankei has hailed this as a victory for Mr. Fukuda's "silent reformism," the prime minister's understated approach to changing Japanese governance. While this may be a way for the prime minister to improve his public image, his position is no less tenuous. The DPJ, by agreeing to cooperate on administrative reform, has successfully used this issue as a wedge issue, separating the prime minister and the LDP's reformists from the party's zoku giin and other friends of the bureaucracy, who are already up in arms over the prime minister's road construction reform plan. In agreeing to substantial concessions to the DPJ in order to secure a legislative victory to boost the government's public standing, Mr. Fukuda may have further weakened his standing within the LDP.

But this is, as LDP HR member Yamauchi Koichi argues, a step forward. A step forward for who, well, that's open to discussion.

The DPJ will use administrative reform as a wedge issue

With the government's having finally dispensed with the gasoline tax and road construction issues — for now — attention is now turning to other portions of the Fukuda agenda, such as it exists.

Item number one is the government's — or perhaps more accurately, Administrative Reform Minister Watanabe Yoshimi's — administrative reform plan (previously discussed here). When I last addressed the administrative reform bill at the beginning of May, the bill had yet to come under discussion in the Diet, with bureaucrats and LDP sympathizers unhappy with the bill.

Now, as of 9 May, the bill is under discussion in the House of Representatives. (The initial proceedings can be read at the National Diet Library site here.) The Fukuda government has decided to prioritize the bill. Prime Minister Fukuda, after a meeting Thursday with the Diet strategy chairmen of the LDP and Komeito, declared that he wants to "exert as much effort as possible" to see the bill passed during the remaining weeks of the current Diet session. It is not clear what "exert as much effort as possible" entails. Does he mean that the government will extend the Diet session to leave the government time to overrule the HC again in the event of DPJ opposition? I ruled out the possibility before, and it seems clear that the Fukuda government will not keep the Diet in session past mid-June. Unlike his predecessor, Mr. Fukuda seems to recognize that freeing up Diet members to campaign in their districts is more important than keeping them in Tokyo to pass token (and watered down) pieces of legislation.

There may actually be some hope for the passage of the government's administrative reform bill, as the DPJ is considering cooperating with the government to pass a revised version of the bill. According to Mainichi, the main points that the DPJ wants to strengthen are provisions related to transparency in politician-bureaucrat contacts and centralized management of the civil service. On the former point in particular, the DPJ wants every case of contact between politicians and bureaucrats reported to the appropriate cabinet minister.

The government, especially Mr. Watanabe, is receptive to the DPJ's position. Nakagawa Hidenao, not in the government but certainly close to Mr. Fukuda, has also spoken favorably about LDP-DPJ cooperation on the administrative reform bill. In a post authored earlier this week titled "More than LDP v. DPJ, the important axis of confrontation is Kasumigaseki leadership v. political leadership," Mr. Nakagawa argued that the government is fully committed to the plan, that it hasn't been watered down from the initial conception of an advisory group to the prime minister, and that the LDP and DPJ must work together to contain the power of the bureaucracy, Mr. Fukuda's "quiet reform."

I still have my doubts about the strength of this bill, not least because as a basic law, it leaves too much detail about implementation unstated. And the DPJ is right to suggest that it doesn't go far enough in curtailing contacts between politicians and bureaucrats. But there is some merit to the bill, not least because it will cause turmoil within the LDP.

The problem is that some (LDP) politicians cannot conceive of a system in which they don't go to the bureaucrats whenever they need information. (Ed. — Or a favor...?)

Okashita Nobuko, an LDP member from Osaka, questioned Mr. Fukuda and Mr. Watanabe about the plan, stating her fear that "if Diet members cannot get essential information from bureaucrats, our activities as Diet members will be obstructed."

Ms. Okashita seems to miss the point of administrative reform (or she gets it too well): it is not aimed solely at bureaucrats, but also at backbenchers who have abused the current system of lax regulation of contact between politicians and bureaucrats to distort policy. (See the case of the late Matsuoka Toshikatsu for a more blatant example.) Presumably restrictions on contact between politicians and bureaucrats will change how the LDP makes policy. The current system, under which the bureaucracy supplies LDP members with information at every stage of the policymaking process thanks to the shadow bureaucracy that is the LDP's policy research system, presumably violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the current administrative reform bill. PARC therefore would have to become more like the British Conservative Party's Research Department, and the party executive — and the prime minister's office — would play an even greater role in establishing policy priorities.

Naturally there are more than a few LDP backbenchers who might be unhappy about this. The DPJ, lacking the dense contacts with the bureaucracy to begin with, has little reason to oppose greater restrictions.

By offering to cooperate, the DPJ is finally using administrative reform as a wedge issue, as the closer the bill gets to passage, the greater the pressure LDP backbenchers will put on the government to back away from the reform (or to make sotto voce promises to water it down in the implementation stage). Administrative reform has the potential to worsen the already strained relations between the Fukuda government and LDP members dependent on pork-barrel politics. In the process, the DPJ can claim that it is acting responsibly on an issue that concerns the public.

The government's administrative reform bill is dying on the vine

Nearly a month has passed since the government submitted its administrative reform bill to the Diet, and Mainichi reports that the bill's prospects are no better now than they were when the bill was submitted. Indeed, they are considerably worse.

With six weeks until the end of the Diet session — unless Mr. Fukuda does like Mr. Abe and gives himself an extension — the bill still has not come up for discussion in the HR. It was scheduled to be debated on 22 April, but was delayed because "there are many other bills that should be prioritized." The bill is now scheduled to be discussed on 8 May, after Golden Week. There is no enthusiasm within the bureaucracy and little within the LDP for administrative reform, and the government, aside from Watanabe Yoshimi, minister for administrative reform, is unprepared to exert significant effort to see the bill passed.

This sounds like the perfect combination to ensure that the administrative reform plan dies an unlamented death next month.

At the same time that the LDP is distancing itself from what was an important part of the Koizumi formula, the DPJ has announced its own "Kasumigaseki reform plan." Rather than imposing restrictions on interaction between politicians and bureaucrats, the DPJ's plan will ensure that bureaucrats see a lot more of politicians — in their own ministries. There is already little love lost between the DPJ and the bureaucracy, and the DPJ's new plan will do nothing to endear it to Kasumigaseki.

The party's administrative reform investigatory committee, chaired by Matsumoto Takeaki (49), an HR member representing the Kinki PR bloc, has announced that when the DPJ takes power, it will greatly expand the number of political appointees in the government. There are currently around seventy appointees to ministerial, vice-ministerial, secretarial, and advisory posts in cabinet ministries and the cabinet secretariat. The DPJ wants to expand that number to around 130, tapping Diet members (and experts from outside the Diet) to serve as advisers to cabinet ministers. And it doesn't just want to create new figurehead positions: the DPJ intends to give the political appointees control over bureaus and policy formulation. The plan also calls for the creation of a centralized bureau of cabinet personnel in the cabinet secretariat, and forbids ministries and agencies from finding new employment for retiring bureaucrats.

The further down into the ministries that the reach of the politicians extends, the more power the government will have to impose its will on the bureaucrats. But the politicians need operational control. Does the DPJ have enough policy experts in its ranks to dispatch them into ministries to battle day-to-day with bureaucrats? A massive influx of advisers long on titles and short on power will not change the situation. So I'm skeptical about whether the DPJ will be able to implement this broad-ranging plan. This shows, however, that a DPJ government would be free to consider radical reforms that the LDP cannot, thanks to its cozy relationship with the bureaucracy.

Administrative reform is not just something that concerns insiders in Tokyo. The people are paying attention. Note that in the Mainichi poll conducted before the Yamaguchi-2 by-election, administrative reform ranked third in order of priority, after health and welfare, and pensions. The public knows who is responsible for misgoverning Japan, and the DPJ is wise to discuss how a DPJ government will deal with the bureaucracy.

The government serves up a weak adminstrative reform bill

On Thursday morning the LDP's headquarters for the promotion of administrative reform approved an administrative reform plan and passed it along to the cabinet. The cabinet approved it Friday morning and will submit it to the Diet later today.

The plan still calls for a new cabinet personnel agency and restrictions on direct contact between politicians and bureaucrats, including the creation of a new specialist class of bureaucrats to coordinate relations between ministries and legislators. As seemed apparent earlier, however, the plan has been watered down from the version outlined by a consultative group and desired by Watanabe Yoshimi, minister responsible for administrative reform. Unlike earlier drafts, ministries will propose candidates for advancement to the personnel agency, instead of the agency's selecting candidates itself. Additionally, in regard to restrictions on contacts between bureaucrats and politicians, bureaucrats can communicate freely with politicians with ministerial approval. (I can imagine that ministerial approval will be terribly difficult to secure.) In addition to the new agency, the plan also calls for changing bureaucratic rules to open paths to ministerial leadership to officials in specialist and clerical positions.

As noted in a Mainichi editorial, the LDP's plan is a victory for the bureaucracy. It does nothing to subordinate ministries and their bureaucrats to the government's wishes. It certainly doesn't satisfy the hopes for administrative reform expressed by Mr. Watanabe in an interview in Liberal Time.

The bureaucracy may never have to worry about adjusting to a new system, as the prospects for the bill in the Diet are dim. The DPJ has indicated that it opposes the watered-down bill on the grounds that it does nothing to address the fundamental problems with the bureaucracy that have led to major policy failures like the pensions fiasco — and dissatisfaction with the bill within the LDP is such that if the bill passes the HR only to have the DPJ reject it in the HC, the government may bow to pressure from zoku giin and not bother submitting to the HR a second time. After all, from the government's perspective, it must be preferable to let the DPJ kill a bad bill and take the blame than to have to confront disgruntled LDP members, which it already has to do on the road construction and gasoline tax bills. (See excellent posts by MTC and Jun Okumura on the looming reformist revolt.)

Regional decentralization is out of reach, for now

Bad news for Aso Taro: progress towards substantial decentralization may be impossible to realize.

So says the government's Prefectural Integration Vision consultation group, which released an interim report on Monday. The whole report is available for download here, in PDF format.

According to Mainichi, the group — which was formed in January 2007 under Mr. Abe — envisions the implementation of drastic reorganization of the relationship between central and regional governments by 2018, but it also announced that it won't have a final report ready for another two years. One sticking point is how the prefectures are to be reorganized. Not surprisingly, drastically redrawing the geographic boundaries of Japan's regional governments draws opposition from existing prefectural governments and bureaucrats in the central governments. Even the LDP and the government have differing ideas about a reorganization, with the LDP's Headquarters for the Promotion of Prefectural Integration calling for consolidating prefectural and local governments into 10 states and 700-1000 municipalities.

And the government's ministries and agencies are, of course, adamantly opposed to a transfer of authority to regional governments.

It's probably safe to say that without the bureaucracy's approval, regional decentralization will not happen.

As I've noted previously, decentralization could have considerable benefits for Japanese governance by bringing government closer to the people and making it more transparent. But there's a reason why this kind of change happens rarely, if at all. (The last major reorganization of regional governments, of course, was in the early years of the Meiji Restoration.) It is easy for politicians and business leaders to appeal to the example of the Meiji Restoration — not surprisingly, this interim report does — but it is considerably more difficult for political leaders to overcome institutional obstacles and implement Meiji-style reforms in the present political environment.

Who can overcome the opposition that proposals like regional decentralization necessarily attract? (And is there actually a majority in favor of sweeping reform? People may be unhappy with the current political situation, but that does not necessarily translate into support for broad change.)

Is administrative reform a wedge issue for the DPJ?

Mainichi has an editorial about the government's administrative reform proposals — discussed in this post.

Most of the editorial simply summarizes the contents of the proposals, but includes a paragraph about opposition within the LDP to the proposals.

"Wholly negative opinions — 'Not realistic' — can be heard from within the LDP regarding the restrictions on direct contact between politicians and bureaucrats, a reform that involves politicians."

Mainichi wants Mr. Fukuda to take up this issue with greater ardor, despite opposition from within the LDP and the bureaucracy. But does Mainichi really expect that to happen? Administrative reform is a great wedge issue for the DPJ. It exposes the government's weak reform credentials, and if the government actually tries to move forward with the Okamura group's plans, it will immediately trigger a fight within the LDP between embattled reformers and the bureaucracy's zoku giin allies.

So why hasn't the DPJ jumped on administrative reform?

Good intentions are not enough

Yomiuri reports that the prime minister's Advisory Group on Comprehensive Reform of the Public Service System, chaired by Okamura Tadashi of Toshiba, has issued its final report containing recommendations for reforming the Japanese bureaucracy.

The report, available for download here, contains a number of good suggestions, in pursuit of seven goals: (1) outlining the appropriate role for bureaucrats in a parliamentary system; (2) hiring and training bureaucrats with skill sets appropriate for the global age; (3) changing the ethos of the bureaucracy so that bureaucrats act as the servants of state and people; (4) retaining world-class personnel; (5) removing the barriers between people and bureaucracy; (6) creating better work-life balance for bureaucrats; and (7) the creation of a central agency to manage government personnel.

Yomiuri calls special attention to the advisory group's call for the creation of a new class of career specialists — a "national strategy staff" — that would be responsible for advising cabinet ministers and the Cabinet Secretariat on legislation. Good idea, maybe, but I'm not clear on how these specialists would be insulated from the ministries that they would serve. What guarantee is there that the guidance they would provide to ministers would be more "national" than that provided by bureaucrats today?

Much of the report focuses on the challenge of making new bureaucrats, and seems particularly keen on hiring more bureaucrats mid-career. (And finding personnel who have skill sets for the twenty-first century.)

Undoubtedly with the political situation in mind, the report calls for legislation creating the personnel agency in next year's regular Diet session and demands implementation of reform legislation within the next five years.

There is no question that the bureaucracy is in need of substantial reform. But simply hiring better people is not enough. To quote Federalist #51, "If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions." No matter how good the "new bureaucrats" can be, they will not be angels (or geniuses). They will still be vulnerable to corruption and incompetence. They will still stonewall politicians or pervert policy on behalf of their ministries.

Any administrative reform without reforms designed to foster a culture of accountability will ultimately be disappointing.

Who's in charge here?

MTC asks an extremely pertinent question about which I have been wondering all week.

While pleasantly surprised by the new cabinet, MTC wonders who exactly was responsible for picking the new lineup. Mr. Abe no doubt has many people whispering in his ear — perhaps he would think more clearly if that wasn't the case — but it is necessary to ask whose guidance was decisive in shaping the new cabinet.

And now that the cabinet and the new party leadership are in place, it's equally important to ask who will be calling the shots; I remain unconvinced that the new cabinet is Mr. Abe's in anything but name only. Not his agenda, not his way of operating — and perhaps not even his people.

One major player will no doubt be new LDP secretary-general Aso Taro. Asahi writes today about Aso's consolidation of power through his control over the new personnel appointments, through which he sought to disarm critics and favor the factions (leading to new widely voiced fear that this cabinet marks a return to the old LDP). For example, Aso named Kosaka Kenji, organizer of an anti-Abe study group, as deputy of the party's Diet strategy committee. In the process, the influence of Mr. Koizumi within the party may be waning, as his followers in the Koizumi non-faction, anti-faction faction have found themselves blocked from power. Koizumi's followers, however, insist that it will benefit them in the long run: "This latest lineup is a reversion. With this, there will be a rise in new Diet members who think 'I will not join a faction.'"

I think such optimism might be misplaced, but at the same time, despair about the return of the old LDP is also misplaced. The old LDP has been destroyed, as promised by Mr. Koizumi. There is no going back to the old way of collusion between bureaucracy and LDP policy specialists and factions, at the expense of the cabinet.

What seems to be emerging instead is a tighter union between party and cabinet. The policy initiating powers of the Kantei have grown, but more at the expense of PARC than of the bureaucracy, which seems to have recovered, at least partially, from its mid-1990s nadir. (The vacuum created by Mr. Abe's poor leadership has undoubtedly helped this process along.) In the new cabinet, we may see a more cohesive LDP working with the bureaucracy as a whole to form policy, thanks to the presence of Mr. Yosano at the head of cabinet secretariat. An article in today's Asahi, not online of course, talks about the new chief cabinet secretary's "respect for the bureaucracy," suggesting that with his hand at the controls of government, the LDP will move further away from the anti-bureaucratic populism of Mr. Koizumi.

Recognizing the shifting balance is an important corrective, at least partially, to the argument made by Tomohito Shinoda in his recent book Koizumi Diplomacy, in which he outlines the emergence of the Kantei as a policy actor in its own right, especially in security policy. Shinoda is not wrong to point to various cases in the past two decades in which the Kantei has played a decisive role in decision making, but as the title implies, the key factor in his cases was often having the right personnel in place (whether Mr. Ozawa as an assistant CCS in the late 1980s or Mr. Koizumi as prime minister) than any permanent institutional change. If there's one constant in Japanese politics, it's that the formal institutions and rules often matter less than the informal arrangements grounded in custom, culture, and personality. The balance of power within the government can change greatly depending on who is sitting where.

Accordingly, the bureaucracy's comeback is due to continue under the second Abe cabinet, thanks both to accommodative, cautious leadership in the LDP and stalemate due to the DPJ's control of the Upper House.

The morning after

The final breakdown: DPJ 60, LDP 37, Komeito 9, Independents 7, JCP 3, SDPJ 2, PNP 2, NPJ 1.

That gives the opposition parties 137 seats to the government's 105, with the DPJ becoming the largest party with 109 seats, more than the government parties combined. With the thirty-two-seat differential between opposition and government parties, there is no possibility for the LDP to undermine the election results by political legerdemain.

Interestingly, the DPJ won big without a major increase in turnout, which was 58.64%, only a slight increase over 2004.

As expected, the full significance of the election will take some weeks to sink in, with a cabinet reshuffle not likely to come until September. The landslide has, of course, already claimed LDP Secretary-General Nakagawa and Upper House head Aoki, but the battle lines within the LDP are being drawn. Older party barons are making supportive gestures to the prime minister — each faction head has reportedly indicated his support — but it seems that younger party members are more inclined to jettison the Abe albatross. Yomiuri quoted former JDA chief Ishiba Shigeru as saying, "Prime Minister Abe should resign. If he doesn't, the LDP is finished."

The DPJ, meanwhile, has stated that its goal is an early dissolution of the Lower House and general election. But while the DPJ comes out of this election with a strong tail wind in its favor, it will face the tricky task of preserving its momentum. Recall that right up until the pensions scandal broke in May, the DPJ was riven with infighting, with members openly questioning the wisdom of the party leadership. The factional and ideological divisions remain. The whiff of power that comes with control of one house of the Diet may temper the divisions somewhat — after all, the LDP has survived for decades despite being more a microcosm of a party system than a cohesive political party. But then again, if Ozawa is forced to step down for health reasons, the resulting leadership fight could aggravate the party's rifts.

And that's before even considering the ideal strategy for managing the Upper House. Should the DPJ be uniformly opposed to the government's agenda, making the Upper House the place where the government's policies go to die? Doing so might force the government's hand on a Lower House election, particularly if the public expresses its distaste for policy gridlock. Alternatively, should the party make a good faith effort to forge a national agenda, or at least national policies? I suppose it all depends on whether there really is a way for the opposition to force the government to cede its super-majority anytime before September 2009. I see little reason to think that the LDP will be tricked into doing so.

And what of the balance of power between LDP, Kantei, and bureaucracy? Will the bureaucracy find its policy making powers restored in the face of gridlock in the Diet? If so, it would reinforce the idea that Japan is in for a period of policy stasis, because the bureaucracy is hardly likely to be the vehicle for dynamic change.

I will have more to say about this election later today — and I will address Noah's questions in the comments then. In the meantime I'm going to the FCCJ to hear Gerald Curtis's take on the election.

Death of the 1955 system? Greatly exaggerated.

With Prime Minister Abe turning his attention and blame to the hapless bureaucrats in the Social Insurance Agency — those bureaucrats who have served as the fly in his constitution revision ointment — the Japan Times published a piece by Philip Brasor discussing the actual conditions within the agency, and the bureaucrats who lorded over citizens, namely the citizens who lacked the protection of company pensions.

Brasor's point: "What the pension crisis teaches us is that the main task of bureaucrats is not service but self-preservation, which makes them actually quite human, and also a bit pathetic."

Bureaucratic self-preservation is common to just about every bureaucracy in the world, but few bureaucracies enjoy the prestige and high status of Japanese bureaucrats. This is undoubtedly factor in the stunted development of Japanese liberalism. Both by undermining civil society and by co-opting politicians by helping them use the policy making system on behalf of private interests, bureaucrats have preserved their kingdom — and lorded over Japan's citizens. The bureaucrats are not entirely to blame for this situation, of course. They have just done what generations of Japanese bureaucrats have done. The blame, instead, falls on the shoulders of Japanese politicians, many of whom are former bureaucrats, who have utterly failed to use the power of the legislature to provide oversight for the bureaucracy and demand accountability. And some blame too should be laid at the feet of the Japanese people, who have accepted, willingly or not, the system whereby elected officials and bureaucrats have cooperated to serve anything but the public interest.

Similar to my argument here, through an utter lack of accountability from inside or outside government, Nagatacho and Kasumigaseki have colluded to misgovern Japan. Change of government in 1993 by no means ended this system. And now the consequences of this collusion is being felt directly, even painfully, by Japanese citizens.

Abe reverts

I have previously discussed how the Abe Cabinet has reverted to form in the cabinet's relationship with the LDP; I have also discussed how Abe has essentially put his predecessor's structural reform ideas on hold.

Asahi picked up this narrative on Sunday, in an editorial on the government's recently issued fiscal policy draft proposal, asking whether it gives one the feeling that "dependence on the bureaucracy is returning." Echoing an argument I've made before about Abe's various reforms, the reforms proposed here (daylight savings time, targets of labor productivity, raising the minimum wage), while good and in and of themselves, hardly constitute structural reform. In the lurch, Asahi argues, the bureaucracy is regaining its former power — meaning an end to drastic change to Japanese economy and society.

The editorial is particularly harsh on budget cuts: the draft includes an overall percentage by which to cut, but leaves the details unstated, which means a role for the Ministry of Finance to fill in the blanks.

While Asahi is right to point out the "reversion," one should not look back at the Koizumi Cabinet through rose-tinted lenses. Koizumi also allied with the MOF bureaucracy to push through budget cuts. And while the Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy (CEFP) was a promising source of reform ideas, it was often ineffective precisely because it had to rely on bureaucracies to move its plans. (Both points are well discussed in Aurelia George Mulgan's Koizumi's Failed Revolution.)

The other point is that the decline in the power and prestige of the bureaucracy as a result of scandals and mismanagement during the 1990s, and the subsequent rise in the stature of politicians and the premiership is not automatically a boon. One of the lessons from the career of Matsuoka Toshikatsu is that a weakened bureaucracy became easy prey for unscrupulous politicians like Matsuoka, who bullied and cajoled bureaucrats to do his bidding. Political leadership alone is not enough. Bureaucratic subordination is not enough. The relationship between politicians and bureaucrats must be clarified, roles clearly defined, and each held accountable for their actions.

But doing so will take the courage to take on both bureaucrats and the LDP's policy organs — and Abe has been unwilling to do either.