Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Tables, Figures, and Appendices
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Puzzle of Japan's Welfare Capitalism
- 1 Rashomon: The Japanese Welfare State in a Comparative Perspective
- 2 Structural Logic of Welfare Politics
- 3 Historical Patterns of Structural Logic in Postwar Japan
- 4 The Rise of the Japanese Social Protection System in the 1950s
- 5 Economic Growth and Japan's Selective Welfare Expansion
- 6 Institutional Complementarities and Japanese Welfare Capitalism
- 7 The Emergence of Trouble in the 1970s
- 8 Policy Shifts in the 1990s: The Emergence of European-Style Welfare Politics
- 9 The End of Japan's Social Protection as We Know It: Becoming Like Britain?
- Conclusion: Two Future Scenarios
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics
Conclusion: Two Future Scenarios
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Tables, Figures, and Appendices
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Puzzle of Japan's Welfare Capitalism
- 1 Rashomon: The Japanese Welfare State in a Comparative Perspective
- 2 Structural Logic of Welfare Politics
- 3 Historical Patterns of Structural Logic in Postwar Japan
- 4 The Rise of the Japanese Social Protection System in the 1950s
- 5 Economic Growth and Japan's Selective Welfare Expansion
- 6 Institutional Complementarities and Japanese Welfare Capitalism
- 7 The Emergence of Trouble in the 1970s
- 8 Policy Shifts in the 1990s: The Emergence of European-Style Welfare Politics
- 9 The End of Japan's Social Protection as We Know It: Becoming Like Britain?
- Conclusion: Two Future Scenarios
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics
Summary
This book has argued that it is possible to identify likely policy outcomes on the basis of three institutional factors: (i) district magnitude; (ii) the importance of the personal vote; and (iii) the government type. This structural logic approach provides a general analytical framework capable of explaining three different sets of variations – cross-national, cross-policy, and historical. This book has traced the postwar origin and development of electorally motivated distributive politics. Through case studies, it has demonstrated that policy makers actually behave the way predicted by the structural logic and for precisely those reasons identified by the logic.
Japan provides a useful test for an institutional model of welfare politics, because it has experienced major institutional changes. After nearly forty years of institutional stability, both Japan's government type and its electoral rules have changed in the past fifteen years. As a result, broadly speaking, Japan has experienced three very distinctive periods characterized by different institutional configurations. If the structural logic is right, we should be able to show differences in the pattern of welfare politics in Japan in the three periods as predicted by the structural logic. This book has shown that Japanese welfare politics indeed changed according to the structural logic.
The first period – the period of institutional stability from the end of the Allied Occupation of Japan to the Upper House election in 1989 – consisted of conservative dominance in the context of a MMD/SNTV system. The MMD/SNTV favored particularistic organized groups linked to individual conservative politicians.
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- Information
- Welfare and Capitalism in Postwar JapanParty, Bureaucracy, and Business, pp. 287 - 296Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008