Empirical Study of Changing Policy Networks

通过对过去30年来与政治家、官僚和利益集团领导人进行的三次调查数据进行分析，我们出版了由久米郁夫和负责这些调查的村松道雄编辑的一本书。这本书试图让人感觉到日本政治在30年里的结构性变化。完成了这个任务之后，我们进入了下一步，那就是对这种转变的因果调查。在适当的时候，我们将调查数据分析与大量调查数据分析和社会经济数据分析以及详细的案例研究相结合。为了整合项目成员进行的各种分析，我们在科比举办了一个临时国际研讨会（2006年3月）。之后，我们与温哥华的不列颠哥伦比亚省大学民主制度研究中心合作，邀请了比较研究日本政治的政治学家T.J.Pempel教授、Ellis Krauss教授、Naoi惠等，举办了“日本民主中的权力关系建模”国际会议。本课题的研究人员在发表论文的同时，与各参与者进行了深入的讨论，得出了以下结论：1）日本的政策制定过程从分散化到高度集中化，这与群众调查分析和利益集团研究所分析的国家社会关系的变化是一致的。我们现在正准备将这些分析提交给国际期刊。

Analyzing the three waves of survey data conducted over three decades with politicians, bureaucrats, and interest group leaders, we have published a book edited by Ikuo Kume and Michio Muramatsu, who has been in charge of these surveys,. This book tried to make sensed the structural change in Japanese politics over three decades. Having achieved this task, we moved on to the next step, that is causal inquiries of this transformation. In due course, we combined our survey data analysis with mass survey data analysis and social-economic data analysis as well as detailed case studies. In order to integrate these various analyses conducted by the project members, we had an interim international workshop in Kobe(March 2006). Then we organized an international conference Modeling Power Relationships in Japanese Democracy with the Center for Study of Democratic Institutions at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, inviting political scientists studying Japanese politics comparatively, Professors T.J.Pempel, Ellis Krauss, Megumi Naoi and others. The members of this project presented their papers and had intensive discussion with various participants.Our general findings are 1) Japanese policy making process, which used to be fairly fragmented and decentralized, has become substantially centralized at the top leader level, and 2) this change is consistent with changes in the state-societal relations being analyzed by the mass survey analysis and the interest group studies. We are now preparing to submit these analyses to the international journals.