Party Politics and Decentralization in Japan and France

When the Opposition Governs

Koichi Nakano

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415553056
• eBook ISBN: 9781135181031
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Decentralization is a curious policy for a central government to pursue. If politics is essentially about the struggle for power, why would anyone want to give away the power that one struggled for and won? This book argues that it is precisely party competition in search of power that propels decentralization.

Koichi Nakano develops his core argument through in-depth, qualitative research on the politics of reform in France and Japan. Introducing the concept of oppositional policy, he traces the process through which parties in opposition reinvent their ideologies and policy platforms in an attempt to present themselves as the voice of the governed, broaden popular support through the advocacy of enhanced democratic control of government, and proceed to implement some of these oppositional policies after capturing power. This book, thus, takes the role of political parties in the democratic process seriously - parties take up certain issues and espouse certain solutions actively as weapons in the power struggle both on the electoral front and in the policy process. Party competition is not merely a formal condition of democracy; it is also a mechanism with substantive policy impact on its evolution.

Party Politics and Decentralization in Japan and France will be of interest to students of Japanese and French politics and comparative politics in general.

1
Decentralization as an “oppositional” policy

Decentralization is a curious policy for a central government to pursue. After all, if politics is essentially about the struggle for power, why would anyone or any group want to give away the power that was struggled for and won? Indeed, “on the actual historical record, political decentralization (as distinct from administrative decentralization) is extremely rare, except perhaps in moments of constitutional upheaval and revolution” (Leonardi et al. 1981: 95), as Robert Putnam and his fellow researchers of Italian regionalization once observed.

The argument has been made that decentralization takes place when local governments are dominated by the political allies of those in the central government—the underlying claim being that it is better to devolve power to one’s friends and supporters than to adversaries. Although it makes sense that politicians are more willing to hand over power to their party allies, it is not clear why they actively choose to do so in the first place. Would it not be better still to keep power for oneself than to give it away, even to friends?

Ideological convictions, as opposed to partisan interests, have also been advanced as a possible explanation. Without denying the relevance of ideas and principles, one has to point out that there is no clear ideological divide between the Right and the Left when it comes to decentralization. Traditionally, decentralization has been associated with the conservative Right because of its sympathies for the pre-modern local order but, in practice, it has been promoted by the reformist Left as well. Today, it is once again popular among the neoliberal New Right, which regards the competition between local authorities under a small central government as analogous to a free market situation. So, to say that it is ideology begs the question of how and why different ideologies come to embrace the concept of decentralization.

This book argues that it is precisely party competition in search of power that propels decentralization. The central claim we advance is that decentralization is fundamentally an oppositional policy that is typically advocated by political parties in opposition (sometimes in spite of their original ideological convictions), placed on the legislative agenda when they come to power, and pursued at times even when it ceases to make partisan sense to do so. In short, decentralization occurs when the opposition governs.

Through in-depth case studies of the politics of decentralization in France and Japan, this book makes the point that decentralization is an oppositional policy that is deeply conditioned by party political competition and, more specifically, by changes of government. Following the advent of the Socialist Party (PS) to power in 1981 for the first time in the Fifth Republic, France embarked on a major reform to remedy its centralized polity. Similarly, after the 38-year continuous one-party rule of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) came to an end in 1993, reformist governments (most notably one led by a Socialist prime minister) pursued an important program of decentralization in a new era of coalition politics in Japan. Both France and Japan have traditionally been known for their centralized mode of modernization, with an overbearing bureaucracy dominating the nation politically and economically, as well as culturally. This state of affairs did not change much—many argue, in fact, that centralization got worse—during the long period of conservative rule after the Second World War. The historical changes of government in both countries resulted in the enactment of the most significant decentralization reforms in the post-war period, with the difference that the changes in France were more sweeping than those in Japan. As we underline the crucial role of party politics in the changes in decentralization policy in these two cases, we also contend that political parties and their interactions account for these divergent outcomes.

Decentralist trends and factors

From around the 1970s, various observers started to take note of the emergence of decentralist trends that countered (if not reversed) the overall centralist tendency of the modernization process, which earlier contributed to the expansion of the role, as well as the sphere of activities, of the central state, especially in the post-war period. A set of factors, some interrelated, has been identified as being key in this change of tide.

Idea/identity/ideology

The conventional scheme of political history pitted the centralist zeal of the modernizers against the traditionalists who were more sympathetic to local identities with feudal roots. The latter, however, were, in reality, typically reluctant accomplices of the centralist modernizers, and only a small minority challenged the centralist, modernizing project of the state from the Right-wing margin of the political spectrum.

From around the 1970s in the developed world, finally reacting to the centralizing imperative of nation-building and state-led economic development, regional identity and its attendant demand for autonomy that were, until then, long dormant, suppressed, or simply absent, came to the surface in a number of countries. In some cases, the mounting regionalism was the result of the revival of pre-modern ethnic, religious, or linguistic identities with deep historical foundation; in others, regionalist demands focused more on the distribution of economic and political resources, on the basis of more recent geographic identities (cf. Amoretti and Bermeo 2004).

The increasing ascendancy of the New Right ideology has also been said to have contributed to the change of tide in center-local relations. In a comparative overview of the trends towards decentralization since the mid-1970s, David B. Walker (1991: 126), for instance, argued that “growing disenchantment with the cost, management, and results of the welfare state in many countries prompted anti-centrist attacks and sometimes accompanying successful moves to promote decentralization,” while also acknowledging that “strong ethno-religious, ethnic, or regional identities that are geographically concentrated have been among the strongest factors prompting centrifugal actions over the past quarter of a century.”

Socioeconomic change

In a series of influential studies on the “silent revolution” from the 1970s on, Ronald Inglehart (1971, 1977) made the case that such socioeconomic changes as unprecedented growth and affluence, the rising level of education, and the expansion of mass communication in the post-war period brought about important shifts in values and the distribution of political skills in advanced industrial societies. According to Inglehart, a high degree of fulfillment of economic and physical security in the West resulted in a “post-materialist” value change towards a greater emphasis on communal belonging, participation, quality of life, and esteem, as well as self-expression. At the same time, political skills, knowledge, and interest became more widely distributed among the mass public, who now acquired increasing potential and appetite for a larger role in making crucial collective decisions.

Although Inglehart’s own concern had more to do with the shaping of supranational identity and the prospect of mass participation in the process of European integration in particular, it is easy to see the implication of his analysis in accounting for a growing popular call for local autonomy and political participation at the subnational levels of government. Indeed, grassroots civic activism, from environmentalism to regionalism, for instance, was often embodied by the growing well-educated, urban middle-class in Europe and elsewhere.

Also focusing on the impact of socioeconomic change but, in his case, on its alleged centralizing tendencies, L.J. Sharpe (1979: 56–57) contended that the recent drive for decentralization was a political reaction to the growing centralization, homogenization, and integration of the society and the state in the West: “decentralist politics may be seen as a reactive phenomenon against the very socio-economic forces of standardization and centralization … The political system is used to resist homogenizing, socio-economic forces.” Similarly underlining the political responses to changing socioeconomic contexts, Michael Keating (1988: 235) pointed out that “sustained regional mobilization aimed at autonomy appears more common not in underdeveloped regions as a protest against modernity but in the more advanced peripheries, where a sense of identity has been maintained and especially where there has been some institutional development.”

Electoral strategy

Placing stronger emphasis on the rational calculations of the political elite, a number of scholars sought to understand decentralization reform as an electoral strategy.

In her comprehensive study of decentralization in France, Vivien Schmidt (1990: 6–7) tried to make sense of the two decentralization reforms of the 1870s and 1980s in terms of successful political strategy on the part of the ruling elite to capture emerging social strata of each period (Léon Gambetta appealed to middle-income peasants and shopkeepers in the late nineteenth century, and François Mitterrand sought the allegiance of middle-level managers and workers a century later):

In both cases the governing majority’s support for local liberty was part of a reasonable political calculation to retain power in the short term as well as a component in a brilliant political strategy to forge a new electoral coalition to retain power in the long term … In both centuries …, support for decentralization was part of a political strategy by the Left to forge a new electoral coalition made up of ascending sociopolitical groups in the periphery.

More recently, a number of Latin Americanists have analyzed the decentralist trends in the region from an “electoralist” standpoint (Montero and Samuels 2004; Eaton 2006). For instance, in a comparative study of decentralization in Andean countries, Kathleen O’Neill (2003, 2005) put forward a theory that considers decentralization as the rational act of political parties seeking to maximize their electoral possibilities. In essence, O’Neill (2003: 1075) argues that decentralization reform takes place when the governing party “does not expect to compete strongly at the national level under a centralized system but expects to do well in subnational elections.”

Party politics and policy change

Without denying the relevance of each of the above factors in accounting for the decentralist trends since the 1970s, this book seeks to combine structure-based perspectives with actor-based explanations by tracing the temporal processes in which parties in opposition engage with their structural settings and adopt and promote decentralization as they compete for power.

In stark contrast to the assumptions of the classical theories of representative democracy that consider party competition through regular elections as the best institutional device to ensure that the government takes heed of the interests of the governed, the principal literatures in empirical political science largely neglect the impact of party politics on policy change. There is, in fact, a widening gap between the public policy literature and the political party literature. The former tends to downplay the role of political parties in the policy process, whereas the latter focuses on either electoral contests or cabinet formation but generally stops there and gives scant attention to actual policy making.

In the field of policy analysis, the policy community thesis provides a prime example of an approach that relegates political parties to a marginal position. The central tenet of the policy community theory is that change in political leadership does not matter because policies are made and unmade in the “informal” and “segmented” world of policy communities, where policy experts, in the bureaucracy and in interest groups, come together, negotiate, and strike deals regardless of which parties are in power.¹ Party politicians pale in importance compared to these policy specialists, who are, as it were, permanent residents of the relevant policy communities. Furthermore, it is argued that, because of the mutual proximity (and sometimes interchangeability) of these regulars of policy communities, a relationship of complicity develops over time, no matter which side of the bargaining table they happen to be sitting on at a given time and, as a result, policy outputs are marked by incrementalism, and even immobilism. In short, as Stein Rokkan (1966: 106) asserts, “Votes count in the choice of governing personnel but other resources decide the actual policies pursued by the authorities.”

The neglect of the role of political parties in policy-making is similarly conspicuous in the “garbage can” model.² For example, although John Kingdon (1995) underlines the relative importance of politicians in agenda-setting in his seminal work on the policy process in the US federal government, “politics” is merely one of the three distinct “streams” alongside “problems” and “policy” in his view. Each stream is largely disjointed from the others, and their fortuitous coupling occurs when “policy windows” open as a result of political crises or events, but “None of these political events—administration change, a redistribution of seats in Congress, national mood shifts—specifies in detail what is to be done” (Kingdon 1995: 168). In other words, the couplings of the streams are essentially accidental occurrences, and political parties are not connected in any meaningful way to the preparation of specific policy alternatives for specific problems that they defined, according to this model.

If we are to fault the public policy literature for its neglect of party– policy linkage, we would, in turn, have to criticize the political party studies literature for its excessive focus on the “decline” of people– party ties that derive from a somewhat naïve conceptualization of “representation.” While it is undisputable that “parties have always been among the handful of institutions whose activities are absolutely essential for the proper functioning of representative democracy” (Montero and Gunther 2002: 2–3) and, consequently, that the examination of the people–party linkage is a worthy endeavor, we need to remind ourselves that the representative function is by no means the only function of parties (Bartolini and Mair 2001; Katz and Mair 2002). This is especially true because representative democracy was never a question of political parties merely reflecting pre-existing social cleavages and popular preferences in a mirror-like fashion (Schattschneider 1975). The debate over whether parties today live up to a fictitious ideal as faithful “channels” of the popular will is of limited use. In reality, political parties actively mold and define the “popular will” through their advocacy and implementation of policies.

The few references that are made to party–policy ties in some form tend to be little more than an application of the spatial model that treats the policy positions of parties as an exogenous given, and reduces policy-making to the mechanics of coalition formation and office distribution (Ware 1996: 330–342, 358–365). As John D. Huber (1996: 10) points out, it appears as if “The emphasis on cabinet dominance in previous research has led scholars to ignore the study of strategic bargaining processes in parliaments” and, in consequence, we are left largely in the dark about how legislative processes play out between cabinet formation and dissolution. Indeed, Huber (1996: 10–14) further points out that the existing literature on parliaments commonly takes a functionalist paradigm, conceptualizing the legislature as a single coherent actor with its own functions and purposes opposite the (dominant) executive in the polity, which curiously lacks purposive actors in its analysis.

This book, in contrast, takes the role of political parties in the democratic decision-making process seriously, and it does so by underlining the agency of political parties in defining political problems and promoting public policies. As Peter A. Hall (1993: 290) argued, the struggle for power is inextricably linked to the battle of ideas, and political actors “acquire power in part by trying to influence the political discourse of their day.” Parties take up certain issues and...

Table of contents

• The Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Studies Series
• Contents
• Series editors’ preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Decentralization as an “oppositional” policy
• 2 Centralist immobilism under conservative rule
• 3 Preparing the alternative in opposition
• 4 France
• 5 Japan
• 6 When the opposition governs
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index