Political-bureaucratic relationships in Japan and the UK

Political-bureaucratic relationships and bureaucrat's roles are major public concern in Japan. Senior bureaucrats, who decided on many policy issues on behalf of politicians under the people's high confidence, successively failed the treatments for housing loan companies, HIV's infection and FBR's incident etc. since 1995. However political-bureaucratic role relations are never clearly divided into two parts, policy and administration. Senior bureaucrats inevitably take part in policy making process owing to comlexity and professionalization in policy making. They need to have political tolerance, programmatic commitment, democratic sensibilities and acceptance of the concept of ministerial responsibility in cabinet government system. Therefore, this research focuses on the attitudinal orientation held toward various dimentions of their work in Kasumigaseki and Whitehall. The study compares Japanese bureaucrats' attitudes toward political-bureaucratic relationships with UK's in the same system. By principal component analysis of their responses to the written questionnaire, two significant different components are indentified; the first is accountability to ministers and the second is discretion in policy making. The analysis shows that Japanese bureaucrats are lass accountable to their ministers than UK's, while they have more discretion in policy making. Finally some recommendations are made about the reform of Japanese civil service system by considering these findings.

論説 (Article)