The Politics of Regional Policy in Japan: Localities Incorporated?

by Richard J. Samuels

Overview

This is the first major study of politics and public administration in Japan to balance the prevailing view of the regional policy process from above" with a view "from below." Developing a comparative framework for understanding the place of localities in policy making, he demonstrates that relations among localities in Japan are much more important than previously supposed.

Originally published in 1983.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691613178
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #582
Pages:	318
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 9.90(h) x 0.80(d)

Read an Excerpt

The Politics of Regional Policy in Japan

Localities Incorporated?

---

By Richard J. Samuels

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1983 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-10152-1

---

CHAPTER 1

Extralocal Linkages and the Comparative Study of Local Politics and Policy

This chapter is designed to make explicit and to provide an analytical scheme for ordering the wide variety of linkages that integrate the social, political, administrative, and economic environments of localities, regions, and nations. Although recognition of the permeability of subsystem boundaries is now a sine qua non of local and regional policy studies, no satisfactory empirically-based theoretical model has yet been developed to guide research into local–nonlocal interdependence and the policy process. Walsh made the first tentative explorations in this area, but except where noted, most other research has proceeded without theoretical guidance.

This is perhaps due to an historical preoccupation with "community power." Local political systems were long viewed as closed systems; a high degree of autonomy was assumed, and the resulting studies were excessively parochial in their treatment of local politics. Yet there were occasional exceptions, low murmurs muffled by the roar of the Great Debate. Warren was one of the first scholars studying local politics in the United States to speak to the vertical linkages extant between the locality and higher levels of government. Indeed, he identified this as symptomatic of the "great change" in local community power in which the interdependence of local system components was being converted into a dependence upon extralocal agencies.

In the literature on the locality in the Third World this dependence was assumed from the beginning. The political development literature tended largely to focus upon nation-building and state-building. The centralization of authority that these processes implied suggested also the penetration of traditional sectors by the expanding modern sector. Localism was understood to be a major impediment to modernization, resulting in a "penetration crisis" which all less-developed countries would necessarily confront, as had the European states before them. When urban areas were addressed, as in the social mobilization literature, they were seen as the breeding grounds for national integration. Urbanization would lead to the development of national identities and participatory attitudes. It was only when participation increased at a faster rate than institution-building that urbanization would be dysfunctional to stable development.

Empirical studies of national–local interaction often pointed toward the "nationalization of local politics." James Rosenau has been credited with the introduction of the notion of the "penetrated system." While he was concerned with the sensitivity of the national system to perturbations generated by international events, his notion of the blurring of the boundaries between domestic and international political systems found currency in the study of local politics. Rodney Jones, one of those who found the notion of central penetration compelling, went the farthest in developing the concept in his study of local politics in India. It should also be noted that studies of central assimilation and penetration of local political units were not restricted to the Third World.

Yet, as Rabinovitz and Trueblood point out, "bets on the strength of national power must ... be hedged" even in Third World countries. Indeed, a wave of revisionist literature emerged stressing that central controls upon local politics and local policies are not always as effective as was previously assumed. Studies of local politics in Europe, in Latin America, in Africa, and in Japan have observed the overall expansion of the public sector at all levels, and have suggested the persistence of local power and local initiative in centralizing political systems. These studies have stressed the capacity of the locality to resist the penetration of the center, even in communist countries. Tarrow, speaking of the first generation of studies of local governments, has made this same point:

When dealing with centralized administrative systems, this tradition frequently focuses on the juridical subordination and financial weaknesses of local governments and ignores both the substantial variations in the de facto autonomy of local governments and the political resources they have in the multifaceted relations between their communities and the state.

The contribution of these revisionist studies has been significant for two reasons. First, they have corrected the mistreatment of local systems as closed units so common in the first generation of community power studies. Secondly, they have suggested the vitality of localism in even the most highly centralized polities of both the developed and the developing worlds. They have accomplished both in the face of contrary theoretical drifts in the discipline. The result has been a rapidly expanding literature on local politics which isolates one or another of the many linkages that unite local and extralocal political activity. This chapter will attempt to bring these together into a single conceptualization of the ways in which local policy agendas are set in part by interaction with extralocal agencies. I will first identify the central assumptions of this varied research tradition.

THE AXIOMS

There have been four consistent assumptions guiding research on this issue that have long been accepted as axiomatic:

Linkages flow from above to below

Much research concerning local politics has emphasized the constraints upon local autonomy. These constraints are based upon hierarchical asymmetries favoring superordinate layers of government. Linkages in this view are essentially "interlevel interventions" that a) are vertical and unidirectional (downward), b) emanate from one of several nodes (state, prefecture, county, central government), and c) are by and large communicated via governmental channels. Local autonomy is seen as endangered by centralization, implying that local activity is increasingly determined by national structures. The "internal colonialism" literature has also contributed to the identification of the mechanisms that lead to the subordination of the locality in the national polity. It departs from the more orthodox literature by stressing nongovernmental and economic instruments of central dominance.

Linkages flow from below to above

Other research suggests that local and regional processes, decisions, and actors may have an independent impact upon the larger national system. Indeed, the phrases "extralocal impact" or "extralocal intervention" may unnecessarily imply a single direction in the flow of influence across levels of government. Empirical studies that appreciate linkages which are initiated from below exist, but are rare. Vidich and Benson, for example, focused upon a small town elite's linkages with the larger society a decade before students of comparative local politics came to accept this approach. More recently, Kesselman noted how urban political machines in the United States have long served as agents of political socialization for newly arrived immigrants, with important consequences for national political change and stability. In this conceptualization, linkages remain vertical, although the direction of the flow is reversed. The unit being affected is variable (state, nation, economic system), and the channels of the interaction may likewise be inconstant.

Although it developed quite apart from the field of comparative urban politics, the patron-client formulation also suggests the utility of this focus. It specifies a structural model of political participation in vertically organized polities, and implies reciprocal benefits for local and supralocal actors. It posits a situation characterized by scarcity for the client and by a moderate level of resources controlled by the patron. Particularistic goods and services are exchanged in a highly personalized context that shapes the relationship between actors of unequal status. By viewing the patron-client network from the base of this exchange pyramid, several studies have detailed the penetration of the central government bureacracy by locally-based clientage relationships.

Studies of urbanization in the Third World also offer important insights into local-level influences on supralocal systems. When urbanization without commensurate industrial growth occurs, development appears to be a highly skewed process involving the industrialization of a small number of large urban centers within underdeveloped nations leading in the aggregate to great inequality. In most Third World nations, "primate" cities, typically national capitals, are sometimes more than ten times larger than the next largest cities (e.g., Manila, Lima-Callao); they contain the highest concentration of influential political actors who directly affect the quality of the urban environment. A reasonable hypothesis would hold that the impact of urban politics upon the larger system, the type of below-to-above linkage addressed in this section, will be greater in countries with "primate" cities than in countries having a less top-heavy pattern of urban-industrial development.

Extralocal linkages are national-local linkages

Although the research concerned with extralocal linkages is split to some degree between those studies that emphasize an upward flow and those that stress a downward flow of impacts, one axiom has guided virtually all of these empirical investigations. While the channels conducting these interactions may be variable, and while these vertical networks may exhibit a two-way flow of influence in some studies, the nodes of these linkages are usually assumed to be the central state on the one hand and the locality or region on the other.

The specification of national-local linkages does not exhaust the full range of local-extralocal interactions. Just as the comparative urban politics literature has accepted the utility of the concept of the penetrated system, it could benefit as well from other theoretical formulations developed by students of international politics. Work on the instruments of international penetration and transnationalism has stressed the importance of such nongovernmental agencies as money markets, multinational corporations, funding organizations, churches, and regional common markets in the shaping of domestic politics. A related body of work on international interdependence has also emphasized penetration in the form of foreign governmental decisions that may shape and constrain domestic policy. From the Third World a somewhat different view of transnational penetration has emerged. The dependency literature has suggested that penetration most often takes the form of intra-elite cooperation across national borders, and that the penetration of foreign priorities is transmitted through the indigenous elite of the Third World. These are the "clienteles" of an international capitalist order that serve to perpetuate international inequality and further the "development of underdevelopment" in the Third World. A similar argument is advanced by Harvey, who suggests that the contemporary urban area is no more than an intermediary in a hierarchical chain that links the expropriation of surplus from the hinterland to the domination of North American and West European metropoles.

All of these formulations provide important tools for the student of local-extralocal linkages. If we accept the idea that localities are often linked to international as well as to national decisions, actors, and structures, then we must be prepared to assess the impact of all that is extralocal. Decisions by multinational corporations to invest in a particular locality (or not to), resources secured by the locality from a foreign-based lending agency, governmental decisions to revalue currency, and the relationship between local leaders and foreign political parties are all examples of the ways in which local communities may be influenced by actors outside the purview of the national system.

Extralocal linkages are supralocal linkages

There is one final assumption which has been almost uniformly accepted in studies of local politics. As we have seen, it is widely agreed that extralocal linkages are vertical, extending upwards or downwards across layers of government, sometimes crossing national borders. Influence may flow from above to below, from below to above, or it may flow in either direction with the nation and the locality conceived of as the terminal points of the interaction. Even many studies which have not been satisified with the national-local assumption have continued to emphasize the vertical nature of extralocal linkages.

But just as all international relationships are not dependency relationships, neither are all extralocal linkages asymmetrical and vertical. Although until now political scientists have not developed a framework to cope with the horizontal interrelationships of localities across the same level of government, there is a rich tradition of such research in two other related fields. Both are regional policy literatures. The first is the work done by economists in the field of regional planning. Drawing upon research in economic development and development planning, this literature is primarily concerned with the amelioration of spatial imbalance, of the possibilities for and the consequences of redressing inequality. The research techniques and the policy prescriptions of this scholarship have been widely applied. The assumption common to these studies is that regional policy is a national instrument. Regional policy is aimed at the integration of spatially-defined, multijurisdictional units through national policy programs. It is the tool of the state, by the state, and is as much a tool for the state as it is one for the targeted regions. Policy prescriptions are uniformly directed at the central ministries, and the idea of involving regional constituencies is seldom addressed. Nevertheless, by identifying regional targets that are multijurisdictional, this research tradition at least suggests the potential for a broader model which would incorporate the local actors themselves. Tarrow et al. make this connection by suggesting a fascinating paradox of the modern state: While policymaking has become increasingly centralized, representation has at the same time become increasingly territorial and localized. They in fact argue causality, suggesting therefore that it is all the more essential that locally-based actors be included in studies of the policy process.

The second regional policy literature comes from work in the field of public administration. Here the primary concern is the rationalization of the public service delivery system, as a response to the increase in the number and scale of local programs. The pioneering work in this area was done earlier in this century by Maxey and by Reed, but the dominant themes have scarcely changed. Most research has concerned the governance of metropolitan areas, and has focused upon legal-formal and institutional change, frequently in the form of experimentation with new units of local government. It has commonly advocated the federation of localities, or stopping short of that, has argued for what we can call the "horizontalization" of local public policy, bringing geographically adjacent public bodies together for the joint provision of public services. Kalk describes the dispatch with which European nations moved toward the creation of translocal federations of localities below the intermediary level of government in the postwar period in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and Rumania. Walsh finds that among the thirteen metropolitan areas in her cross-national study, translocal cooperative arrangements are most highly advanced in Stockholm. She also cites widespread utilization of these formulae in France (syndicats). Aron details the same kinds of activities in American metropolitan areas. Usually stimulated by federal programs, regional councils sprang up nationwide in the 1960s. The lack of translocal integration has also attracted the attention of researchers. Robert Wood, reflecting upon the maze of administrative jurisdictions in the New York metropolitan area, called it "one of the great unnatural wonders of the world."

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from The Politics of Regional Policy in Japan by Richard J. Samuels. Copyright © 1983 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• Figures, pg. ix
• Tables, pg. xi
• Acknowledgments, pg. xiii
• Preface, pg. xvii
• Chapter One. One. Extralocal Linkages and the Comparative Study of Local Politics and Policy, pg. 3
• Chapter Two. The View from Above: Legal-Formal Intergovernmental Linkages, pg. 37
• Chapter Three. The View from Below: Patterns of Intergovernmental Communication, pg. 83
• Chapter Four. The View from Above: Regionalization Schemes, pg. 123
• Chapter Five. The View from Below: The Politics of Regional Policy in Tokyo Bay, pg. 161
• Chapter Six. Public Policy, the Periphery, and Comparative Politics, pg. 241
• Appendices, pg. 261
• Index, pg. 283