Why Does the Japanese Prime Minister Favor Ministers with Special Assignments?

• In Event: Further Expansion of the Japanese Prime Minister’s Power

Abstract

Delegating responsibilities among diverse political actors has been an important them for scholars. Research has delved into analyzing delegation within parliamentary systems using a principal-agent model (Ramseyer and Rosenbluth 1993, Strom 2003). Conventional wisdom holds that delegations in parliamentary systems are straightforward and unilateral. In essence, the parliamentary system involves a series of delegations among various actors, each relationship resembling that of a principal and an agent. The first chain of delegation starts from the voters to the legislators, the second from the legislators to the prime minister, then from the prime minister to the ministers, and lastly from the ministers to the public officials. In this delegation chain, it is assumed that the prime minister delegates to ministers who act as heads of departments.

Contrary to this conventional wisdom, this paper demonstrates that the Japanese prime minister does not delegate formulation of important policies to department head minister. Instead, he typically delegates important policies to the minister with special assignments who lack authority to lead departments.

Following the government reform of 2001, the Japanese prime minister can choose between the department head ministers and the ministers with special assignments when delegating authority for policy formulations.

This paper explains why the Japanese prime ministers have increasingly delegated important policy formulation to the minister with special assignments more after the reform, drawing insights from American politics. Findings from American politics point out that the US president delegates crucial policy formulations to the White House rather than department secretaries. Similarly, the Japanese prime minister fovors the ministers with special assignment because he can project more efficient oversight in two ways. First, the prime minister can consolidate policies in different areas into one minister. Second, as special assignment ministers must rely on bureaucrats in the Cabinet Secretariat and the Cabinet Office. Given that the prime minister controls there organizations a their head, the prime minister can effectively monitor the bureaucracy under the ministers.

Author

• Harukata Takenaka, GRIPS(National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies)