The Partial Presidentialization of Parties in Japan

Abstract

Japan is an especially good case for exploring the phenomenon of “presidentialization” in the context of the explanatory variables that Gianluca Passarelli laid out in his introductory chapter. Japanese politics presents the analyst with a fundamental puzzle. Its constitutional structure and formal institutions, with the exception of the electoral system, closely resemble the UK’s. Yet rather than “cabinet government” or a “Westminster system” of centralized parties and government revolving around the prime minister, for many years Japan seemed to represent an extreme case of the “Un-Westminster” system, with arguably the weakest prime minister and cabinet among the advanced industrialized democracies (George Mulgan, 2003; Estevez-Abe, 2006). Its political process did not feature alternation in power among two parties but rather one-party dominance; that party and its policymaking did not revolve around the cabinet and prime minister but was decentralized in the extreme, featuring a “bubble up” policymaking process in which the prime minister and cabinet did not determine the policymaking agenda but more often responded to it. The governmental process was influenced as much by the bureaucracy as by politicians, and more by veteran backbenchers in the ruling party than by the cabinet and prime minister (Krauss and Pekkanen, 2010). A key puzzle, then, is why Japan’s political process was so unlike a Westminster system despite featuring a somewhat similar constitutional design.