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Legislative Time and Agenda Power in the Japanese Diet

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Legislative Time and Agenda Power in the Japanese Diet Review of Asian and Pacific Studies Vol.20 65 Legislative Time and Agenda Power in the Japanese Diet Mikitaka Masuyama Faculty of Law, Seikei University E-mail: [email protected] Abstract In this study, I try to understand how legislative time affects the way agenda power is exercised in the Japanese Diet. My analysis relies on the statistical technique of duration modeling, which can be used to explore the effects of independent variables on the occurrence and timing of an event of interest. Duration modeling not only captures the life course of individual legislation within the Diet, but also helps conceptualize the broader policymaking process including pre-parliamentary stages. By applying the Cox partial likelihood method for estimating how long it takes for a bill to pass the Diet, I show that the agenda priority given to a bill affects its fate. I. Introduction In this study, I try to understand how legislative time affects the way agenda power is exercised in the Japanese Diet. My analysis relies on the statistical techniques of duration modeling that have been developed to deal with the question of how long it takes for an event of interest to occur. The idea of duration analysis not only captures the life course of individual legislation within the Diet, but also helps conceptualize the broader policymaking process including pre-parliamentary stages. The data set I have compiled includes government legislation in budgetary sessions for the postwar period to 1996, and allows me to estimate the “legislative duration” of individual proposals. The analysis shows that successful government proposals are dependent on agenda setting in the Diet. Although the Diet occupies a central place in the Japanese Constitution, most observers conclude that the administrative agencies are dominant in initiating legislation and the Diet ceremonially ratifies the bills proposed by the agencies. A few scholars have challenged the conventional view and argued that the constitutional design of the Diet necessitates interparty accommodation and makes the legislative process more “viscous” than it appears. As Mochizuki (1982) puts An earlier version was presented at the 1999 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago IL. I acknowledge comments and suggestions from seminar participants at the University of California, San Diego, and Seikei University. I received excellent assistance from Sam Taylor. Review of Asian and Pacific Studies Vol.20 66 it, all the parliamentary institutions that constrain the ruling majority’s power directly or indirectly relate to “time” (p.48). Despite the fact that legislative scholars agree on the importance of time management in the Diet, no study has systematically examined the effects of timing at the individual legislation level. Existing studies have been mostly concerned with the effect of time constraints at the aggregate level. These studies ask, for instance, what percentage of legislative proposals were passed in a given legislative session or year. Is this related to the shifting partisan share of parliamentary seats? Is it decreasing or increasing as parliamentary members become accustomed to the rules of the Diet? These questions are important. At the same time, however, we should use caution in interpreting such aggregate indicators. The passage rate of legislative proposals may increase if the administrative agencies are capable of forcing the Diet to approve their desired bills. It also increases if the government anticipates a parliamentary backlash and strategically drafts proposals acceptable to the Diet. The problem of aggregation also sheds light on the serious flaws in existing legislative studies. Although it is critically important to recognize that the bills actually deliberated and voted on in the Diet merely represent a limited sample of potential proposals, existing studies primarily focus on “observable” events such as the failure of government sponsored legislation and the confrontation between government and opposition. Scholars who argue that bureaucrats dominate policymaking often point to the high success rate of government proposals, assuming that their passage indicates the fulfillment of bureaucratic will regardless of the parliamentary preference.1 Nevertheless, the same observation may well be regarded as evidence of efficient legislative- administrative delegation from the perspective of those who view bureaucrats as a loyal agent of politicians.2 Similarly, scholars who take a positive view of the Diet look at legislative proposals in which interparty conflicts are observed during the course of legislation.3 It is, however, important to recognize that the share of conflicting legislation at best reflects the quantity of legislation that the opposition dislikes. When there is no overt interparty conflict, we are unable to tell whether the opposition is powerless in lawmaking, or government bills are drafted in consideration of parliamentary preferences and there is no reason for the opposition to filibuster. By focusing on the “controversial” cases defined by ex post failure or confrontation, existing studies are fundamentally limited in their analytical scope. This observationalistic approach has been doubly problematic for legislative scholars. It not only keeps attention away from the Diet, but also enhances the tendency to focus on pre-parliamentary stages where observable actions such as legislative initiation and bargaining take place. As a consequence, the 1 Pempel (1974) and Johnson (1982). The idea of bureaucratic dominance is often subscribed to Tsuji (1952). 2 Ramseyer and Rosenbluth (1993). See also Cowhey and McCubbins (1995). 3 Mochizuki (1982), Krauss (1984), Iwai (1988), Tani (1995), and Richardson (1997). Review of Asian and Pacific Studies Vol.20 67 bureaucratic dominance argument has been both intentionally and unintentionally overstated. Although scholars have begun emphasizing the active role played by the dominant conservative party, the Liberal Democratic Party (hereafter LDP), they are still concerned with cases of overt political involvement prior to the parliamentary stage and tend to ignore unpoliticized ones. Therefore, a vast majority of legislation that the Diet ordinarily produces has not undergone academic scrutiny. In redirecting attention to the Diet, I try to understand systematically the way agenda power is exercised in the Diet. Where I depart from the existing studies is to examine the effect of timing at the individual legislation level.4 The paper proceeds as follows: I begin by describing the idea of legislative duration. I show that duration modeling is not only appropriate to capture the life course of individual legislation within the Diet, but is also useful in conceptualizing the part of policy making process that occurs prior to action in the Diet. The data set I use to estimate how long it takes for a bill to pass the Diet consists of controversial as well as ordinary government legislation for the postwar period to 1996. The estimates offer a basis for examining whether the fate of legislation is systematically affected by shifts in partisan strength or the lapse of time. More importantly, it shows that successful government proposals can be dependent on the way agenda setting is controlled. In the concluding section, I summarize the findings and discuss the implications for Japanese politics. II. Defining Legislative Duration 1. Legislative Duration Duration analysis is a statistical technique used to provide an answer to the question of how long it takes for an event of interest to occur.5 It allows us to examine, for instance, the effects of medical treatment (i.e., how long patients can survive after an operation) and unemployment benefits (i.e., how soon people find a job). The question has at least two parts, i.e., if something will occur and when it occurs. A binary dependent variable model is appropriate for the former question, but ignores information pertaining to the latter. On the other hand, an ordinary continuous dependent variable model is inadequate to deal with the issue of 4 Fukumoto (2000) also examines the time factor at the individual legislation level although his analysis is based on the traditional assumption of linearity in legislative time, and fails to account for the time constraint imposed by the term of legislative sessions. See Masuyama (2000) for an examination of the linearity assumption in legislative time. 5 In political science, duration analysis has been applied to cabinet duration (King, et. al., 1990 and Warwick, 1994), leader survival (Bueno de Mesquita and Siverson, 1995), international war and peace (Bennett and Stam, 1996 and Bennett, 1997), and electoral campaigning (Box- Steffensmeier, 1996). For lawmaking, see Box-Steffensmeier, Arnold and Zorn (1997), Kessler and Krehbiel (1996), Grant (1999), and Martin (1999). For the Diet, see Masuyama (1998a, 1998b, 1999a, 1999b, and 2000). See also Beck (1998), Box-Steffensmeier and Jones (1997), Bennett (1999), and Box-Steffensmeier and Zorn (1998). Review of Asian and Pacific Studies Vol.20 68 censoring. For instance, during a certain study period some patients may die while others may survive beyond the period's conclusion. We are unable to observe the death of surviving patients that otherwise might be observed if the length of the study period were somewhat longer. In the data set, these surviving patients are “censored.” By using an ordinary technique, we fail to distinguish the patients who died
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