Invention of Policy Systems in Advanced Countries: Building a Synergy Core for Comparative Policy System Studies.
Program Leader: Prof. TAKAHASHI, Susumu/ Graduate Schools for Law and Politics; Department of Political Science
Nowadays when political phenomena are becoming ever more complex, there is a pressing need not to improve the content of individual policies, as has been done so far, but to make revolutionary change in the horizontal “policy system,” itself. It has, moreover, become clear that political phenomena go beyond the political sphere consisting of political parties, the bureaucracy, interest groups, etc., which have been the main targets of traditional political analysis, and are currently spreading out into fields, like the interface between international and domestic politics, the interface between the government and market/society, the interface between the system for developing and applying science and technology and the political decision-making system.
With this situation in mind, this center will study the new form of politics in the fields that are in the process of expanding, and clarify the total policy system by placing the traditional factors of the policy system, such as political parties and the bureaucracy, in a new context. This program will emphasize the idea that policy and the political system are always linked together. Rather than viewing creation of a new policy as a reform of a malfunction in policy, our center regards it as a dynamic process of creation out of decay.
This center aims (1) to conduct comparative analysis of creating a “policy system” in the advanced industrial countries in terms of both policy fields, where various experiments are conducted, and the main players to realize them, and (2) to establish a data- store by collecting and digitalizing the vast amount of data concerning policy systems. To explain this more concretely, the following will be achieved in this center : (1) A new field of policy system research will be created through dynamic analysis based on research into policies, conducted heretofore mainly in the fields of public administration and policy science. Concerning the linkage between policy and the political system, comparative studies will be conducted about the changing roles of the main players, by analyzing experiments in the new fields in a critical state. (2) Analysis will be conducted focusing on the new fields of political phenomena, which are highly significant for the future of Japan, though little attention has been paid to them so far: i.e. reform of regulations, policy assessment, decentralization of authority, urban policy, science and technology policy, etc. (3) Japan has always tended to rush into introducing foreign policy models, while hardly trying to extract the characteristics of Japan's own policy and policy system through comparison with those of foreign countries. We will use the methodology of comparative political science to make up for this weak point.
This center has analyzed the general election of 2003 and the House of Councilors election of July 2004, and released its results in newspapers, etc. At the same time, it has also been organizing data about the decentralization of authority.
