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Both academics and journalists have given increasing attention to the rising importance of prime ministers – a phenomenon often referred to 'presidentialization'. Although many commentators use the term differently, and the term blurs the line between the very different institutional contexts of a parliamentary and presidential system, one careful definition of the term is 'the movement over time away from collective to personalized government, movement away from a pattern of governmental and electoral politics dominated by the political party towards one where the party leader becomes a more autonomous political force.'This phenomenon has been observed primarily in Britain and in West European parliamentary democracies – no one has ever described the Japanese parliamentary system as even remotely 'presidentialized'. In fact, the Japanese prime minister has not been the subject of much academic research, and even the Japanese press often used to ignore the prime minister. Despite being the leader of a majority party in a centralized political system, the Japanese prime minister was almost universally described as weak and uninteresting, with both academic and popular discourse focusing on the powerful bureaucracy and factional politics within the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). However, recent political changes, most prominently the selection and popularity of Junichirō Koizumi as Japan's prime minister in the spring of 2001, have led to a surge of interest in the prime minister.

Japanese complaint activities at the World Trade Organization, US-Japan trade liberalization, the Asian financial crisis and aftermath, and regional security; 4 articles. Contents: International law, industry, and the state: explaining Japan's complaint activities at the WTO, by Saadia M. Pekkanen; The US, Japan, and trade liberalization: from bilateralism to regional multilateralism to regionalism+, by Ellis S. Krauss; Embedded policy preferences and the formation of international arrangements after the Asian financial crisis, by Nobuhiro Hiwatari; Japan's approach toward Asian regional security: from "hub-and-spoke" bilateralism to "multi-tiered", by Kuniko Ashizawa.

What political role does the Japanese press play? How does it cover important political issues & events? The common answers in the literature offer two very different views: the press as a "watchdog" for the public & a force of opposition to the dominant ruling party or the Japanese press as a "lapdog," subserviently reporting whatever officials dictate. We examine the Asahi newspaper's coverage of two critical issues in a decade of enormous political upheaval: political reform from 1992 to 1994 & administrative reform from 1995 to 1997. An analysis of the patterns of coverage for all the articles during these periods & an examination of agenda setting, bias, & objectivity in a random sample of articles reveals that neither of the extreme characterizations of the press fits. Rather, the press plays a combination of roles: It is frequently the passive transmitter of information for agenda-setting officials, but it occasionally exhibits a pro-reform bias & tries to set the agenda in specific & limited ways. The authors conclude with a discussion of why these patterns of coverage emerge & why these overdrawn & distorted images of the Japanese press still exist. 4 Tables, 4 Charts, 33 References. [Copyright 2002 Sage Publications, Inc.]

Argues that US intervention in the manufacturing sector relies more on trade incentives than on industrial promotion.

Faced with a formidable competitiveness problem, the American government chief executive appeared to offer a series of ad hoc responses in the 1980s. Contrarily, this article suggests that executive responses to foreign economic challenges follow a predictable pattern. Pointing to the interactive effects of ideology and interest, this article argues that both the degree and type of executive response, be it in the form of market-opening strategies, of temporary or permanent forms of protectionism, or of adopting a laissez-faire approach, can be predicted based on two factors: whether a sector is characterized as "high tech" and whether it is considered to be competitive. A major implication of this argument is that the U.S. chief executive has used trade policy as a surrogate for industrial policy; but in so doing, the strategic considerations associated with industrial policies have been bypassed. The major effect is that the executive fails to intervene only in the realm of an "infant industry" policy—the area most likely to generate a dynamic economy. The product of this combiantion of protectionist policies is a stagnant economy that we term "compromise protectionism."

This article extends the recent empirical work on the perceptions and role of bureaucrats and politicians in policymaking. The question of the relationship between politicians and bureaucrats and the role of each in policymaking is especially important in the case of Japan, because the prevalent models of Japanese politics and policymaking are those of the "bureaucracy dominant" or of a closely interwoven "ruling triad" of bureaucracy, big business, and the governing Liberal Democratic Party.Data are from a systematic survey of 251 higher civil servants and 101 members of the government and opposition parties in the House of Representatives, supplemented by data from other surveys and, wherever possible, compared to equivalent data from western democracies.The results indicate that Japanese politicians and bureaucrats resemble Western European elites both in social background and in the fact that although the roles of politician and bureaucrat are converging, there are still differences in their contributions to the policymaking process. However, politicians influence policymaking more than most models of Japanese politics have posited, and even government and opposition politicians share some consensus about the most important policy issues facing Japan. A factor analysis demonstrated that higher civil servants' orientations toward their roles vary significantly with their positions in the administrative hierarchy.The 27-year incumbency of the LDP as ruling party has been particularly important in determining the Japanese variant of the relationship between politicians and bureaucrats. We suggest that the Japanese case shows that the bureaucracy's increasing role in policymaking is universal; however, in late-modernizing political systems like Japan's, where the bureaucracy has always been a dominant actor, the growing power of politicians in postwar politics has been the most significant actor in bringing about more convergence in the two elites. Our data on this trend argue for a more complicated and pluralistic view of Japanese policymaking than that provided by either the bureaucracy-dominant or the ruling-triad model.