THE DAILY YOMIURI - January 13, 1999

Structural Reform In Japan Should Include Innovations In Policymaking

by Steven C. Clemons

"The Diet shall be the highest organ of state power, and shall be the sole lawmaking organ of the State," so states Chapter IV, Article 41 of Japan's 1947 Constitution. Yet, the last 41/2 decades have provided shamefully few examples where the Diet has been anything more than a rubber stamp for policy initiatives molded by bureaucrats in cooperation with the nearly always dominant Liberal Democratic Party.

Even with the recent attention generated by opposition Minshuto (Democratic Party of Japan) leader Naoto Kan's rise, and with the prospects for real choice between conservatives and liberals becoming more tangible in future years, the structure of Japan's legislative process still inhibits its elected Diet members from offering creative and diverse policy options to the Japanese public. Nearly all legislative efforts are dominated by LDP and ministry apparatchiks, while creative policy proposals by individual legislators are both informally discouraged and formally prohibited.

Given the mounting challenges to Japan's economic and security circumstances, and given the years of rhetoric about politicians finally taking back control from bureaucrats, it seems that Japan's many structural reform efforts should include focusing on the specific rules of policymaking, particularly those that discourage debate and discussion of proposals offered by individual Diet members.

The rules of an institution have great impact on the substance of legislation, as well as on the process of securing passage. In the United States, for example, individual members of Congress are permitted to draft legislative proposals and submit them for consideration. The vast majority of those bills do not become law, but at least the politician's ideas are injected into the public debate and are visible to his or her constituents, as well as to rivals who care about the policy question being considered. The U.S. legislative process presumes that there will be competition between contending proposals, and even opposition-led policy proposals--such as those made by Democrats in a Republican-dominated Congress--frequently become law.

In Germany as well, individual Bundestag members can submit legislation to be considered and passed by a parliamentary system, even though the principal sponsor of a bill is in opposition to the government. One case in point is a bill submitted by the Free Democratic Party--which occupies less than 6 percent of Bundestag seats--that would allow children of Turkish-descended immigrants to receive German passports and become German citizens, regardless of their parents own decisions about German citizenship. This proposal has not yet passed the Bundestag, but it is likely to do so, because neither the Social Democrats nor the Greens, who control the government, want to oppose that piece of emotion-ridden legislation.

In Japan, individual Diet members may only introduce legislation if they have a significant number of cosponsors. A budget-relevant legislative proposal, which many of the most important bills are, requires 50 signatures before introduction in the House of Representatives. A non-budget-relevant bill still requires 20 cosignatories. In the House of Councillors, the requirements for signatures are slightly lower, but they still represent an enormous constraint on individual efforts to participate in the policy process.

Some who oppose allowing individuals to make their own legislative submissions to the Diet, without the requirement of many cosponsors, charge that the number of policy submissions would erupt in greater and greater numbers, complicating the ability of the Diet and its committees to handle the workload. Others, less publicly, believe that most politicians are incapable of drafting credible legislation and do not have the requisite skills to be true legislators.

The Constitution establishes the Diet as the venue and institution for lawmaking, and the Japanese public has elected representatives to pursue their interests in that national assembly. Parties and bureaucracy are necessary to the process, but they are not part of the Constitution, nor should they have the right to squelch or inhibit a democratically elected Diet member from pursuing legislative results that his or her constituents want.

Moreover, like the United States, Japan makes significant legislative counseling available to Diet members. In the United States, the Legislative Counsel Service, established in both houses of Congress, employs several dozen attorneys who have no other job but to assist members of Congress and their staffs in drafting legislation. Those lawyers work for all members of Congress, not for any single member, and they are required to maintain attorney-client privilege in their work, meaning that they are forbidden from disclosing to anyone the nature or direction of the congressional member's legislative proposal, even if they are also working on a legislative draft on the same policy topic for that politician's enemy.

The Legislative Counsel Office is critical to the U.S. legislative machine, and it works. Japan has established such offices in both houses and has a Legislative Referral Service in the National Diet Library, but, unfortunately, very few members of the Diet use those resources. They do not use them because the political parties dominate the process and because the requirements of cosponsorship make the hurdle too high for individuals and small groups to introduce creative and useful proposals before the public.

Two years ago, the government set aside funds so that each Diet member could add one policy-oriented staff member to his or her office. It has also traditionally provided funding for two other staff members, who are typically focused not on policy but on constituent politics. The addition of policy persons to Diet staff is a small step in the right direction, but it is woefully inadequate in terms of getting Japan's politicians back into the business of public policy.

Not long ago, when the prospect of a Japanese economic meltdown was being seriously contemplated, when banks looked irretrievably insolvent and the Japanese economy was entirely unresponsive to both fiscal and monetary stimuli, many Japanese commentators began to say that new ideas were essential, that bureaucrats in the Finance Ministry did not know what to do, and that the nation's most erudite politicians were stymied about Japan's next steps. As if in a chorus, more and more political leaders said that new ideas needed to be generated and that reform must loosen the tight regulation not only of Japan's industry and economic capacity but also of its thinking.

Clearly, one modest change to Japan's policymaking rules could deliver the kind of creative proposals that Japan needs in order to meet its next set of challenges. If Ichiro Ozawa, the leader of Jiyuto (Liberal Party), and Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi would suspend the requirement of cosponsors for legislation in the Diet, they would generate more policy achievements for Japan than will the efforts of Ozawa to get the LDP to study tax reform, to knock a few spots off of the cabinet roster, and to get a modest expansion of Japan's participation in U.N. peace-enforcement assignments.

If Japan allows its highest deliberative body to become the venue for real consideration of public policy proposals, made by individuals, then Japan will deliver much to its public both in better government and in terms of being a better democracy.