THE JAPAN DIGEST
FORUM - January 20, 1999

Policy Need: Restructuring Japan's Legislative Process

by Steven C. Clemons

Japan's Diet is supposed to be supreme in the making of public policy, but for the past 45 years it has been little more than a rubber stamp for policy initiatives molded by bureaucrats and the LDP. Even the rise of Naoto Kan and the opposition Democrats, who may sometime offer voters a real choice between conservative and liberal leadership, hasn't changed a process whose effect is to stifle Diet member initiatives.

In the Diet, the writing of legislation is dominated by LDP and ministry apparatchiks. Creative policy proposals from individual legislators are both informally discouraged and formally prohibited. But given the years of rhetoric about politicians finally taking control of government, Japan's structural reform ought to include changes in rules that discourage policy proposals from individual Diet members.

The rules of an institution have great impact on the substance of what it does. In the United States, for example, any member of Congress may submit bills for consideration. The vast majority of such proposals go nowhere, but at least the politician's ideas are injected into the public debate, where they are visible both to constituents and to interested policy communities. The U.S. legislative process ordains a competition between contending ideas under which even opposition proposals can become law.

In Germany as well, individual Bundestag members can submit legislation even if the sponsor is in opposition. A case in point is a bill by the Free Democrats, who hold less than 6% of Bundestag seats, to let the children of Turkish immigrants become German citizens regardless whether their parents do so. This proposal seems likely to pass because neither the Social Democrats nor the Greens--the controlling coalition--want to oppose it.

Cosponsorship:  But in Japan, individual Diet members may only introduce legislation with a significant number of cosponsors. A budget-relevant law requires 50 signatures in the lower house; even a bill with no budget impact requires 20. The requirements in the upper house are lower but remain an enormous constraint on individual participation in the policy process.

The arguments against a change in the rules are that the number of proposals would mushroom and create legislative overload, and that politicians anyway lack the drafting skills to write their own laws. I would argue that this system is a patent violation of the Constitution, which establishes the Diet as the venue for legislation. Parties and bureaucrats may be necessary to the process, but they are not part of the Constitution, and should not have the right to inhibit elected Diet members from pursuing the interests of their constituents.

Legislative Counseling:  In any case, like Congress, the Diet makes legislative counseling available to members. The U.S. Legislative Counsel Service employs dozens of lawyers to help members and staff draft laws. Japan has similar offices in both houses and a Legislative Referral Service at the National Diet Library. But few members use them, mainly because the parties dominate the process by keeping the sponsorship hurdle too high.

Two years ago, the government decided to add one policy-oriented staffer to the office of each Diet member. (Two other professional staffers focus mainly on constituent affairs). That was a small step in the right direction, but more is needed to get Japanese politicians truly into the public policy business.

Some months ago, when the banks looked irretrievably insolvent and the economy was entirely unresponsive to fiscal and monetary stimuli, many commentators began to say that new ideas were essential. The feeling was that both the Finance Ministry bureaucrats and the political elite were stymied. Since then, many political leaders have said they believe that one object of deregulation must be to loosen not just the rules that govern industry and finance, but those that stifle fresh thinking.

Clearly, a modest change to the legislative rules could open the way to a flow of creative new proposals. If Prime Minister Obuchi and his new Liberal coalition partner, Ichiro Ozawa, moved to suspend the legislative cosponsorship requirements, they would generate more policy proposals than any number of studies on tax reform, the cabinet or military peacekeeping assignments. Enabling a free flow of ideas in the legislature would go a long way toward making Japan the democracy in practice that it is in structure.