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Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide passed a set of digital laws in 2021, which enabled the establishment of the Digital Agency as a central element in the e-government and the digital transition in Japan. Despite its great significance, the laws were prepared and passed in a record-breaking time. This article sets out to determine the factors contributing to the swift acceptance and success of the digital law package utilizing the multiple stream framework by John W. Kingdon. It demonstrates how Suga's ambitions coincided with a unique policy window opened by an unlikely confluence of the global pandemic and a persistent policy community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the institutional arrangements surrounding the Japanese prime minister and offers an analysis of the core executive style in accordance with the classifications introduced by Dunleavy and Rhodes. The constitutional arrangement was set out to establish a 'prime ministerial government' in Japan. However, Japanese bureaucrats, who feared strong individual authority, instead sought to create a 'cabinet government' which exercises strong authority as a collective body. In addition, two developments weakened the prime minister's power over the cabinet, namely the ceremonial role of cabinet meetings and strong factionalism within the ruling party, which led to a 'bureaucratic coordination model'. Since the 1990s, institutional reforms have shifted the Japanese core executive towards a 'prime ministerial government'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japanese security policy has undergone a significant degree of evolution since the early 1990s. As a result, the range of responses Japan can make in international crisis has significantly expanded. The gradual evolution and expansion of the Japanese security policy culminated in the legislation of security-related bills under the second Abe administration in September 2015. The security-related bills dramatically transformed Japanese security policy as it allowed Japan to exercise the right of collective defense when certain conditions are met. The gradual change of Japanese security policy has so far gathered much academic attention. There is a strong claim in the existing literature on Japanese security policy that changes in security policies became possible because of reforms in domestic institutions, which had expanded the Japanese prime minister's power. It is the contention of this article that the Japanese prime minister is still faced with severe constraints from the Diet, in particular from the House of Councilors even after a series of institutional reforms has empowered Japanese prime ministers to significantly alter Japanese security policy. It demonstrates that as the House of Councilors has significant power in the Japanese political system, some Japanese prime ministers had to have the implementation of some security policies delayed or was driven to revise some policies they had originally envisioned through several case studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows how a series of institutional reforms since 1994 have transformed the Japanese prime minister's relationship with other actors in the Japanese parliamentary system and expanded his power. It further discloses that his power has grown even more since the formation of the second Abe administration in 2012. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cabinet scandals and minister resignations happen frequently in Japan. In recent years, political opponents and the mass media have approached such cases as occasions for pursuit of the prime minister’s ‘appointive responsibility’. Based on comprehensive source material since 1989 but focusing particularly on 2006–2012, this paper introduces appointive responsibility as an object of critical analysis. Emphasizing that the notion has distinct ideological implications, I pinpoint the rhetorical techniques and strategic rationale underlying appointive responsibility and show that the phenomenon operates in two logically opposed forms. The first form follows a causality principle and presents the prime minister as inappropriately ignorant. The second one operates according to a representative logic and revolves around inappropriate knowledge. Outlining and problematizing both forms, the paper analytically unravels key aspects of a new paradigm of executive leadership and responsibility in Japanese political discourse. The paper contributes to a better qualitative understanding of responsibility constructs in recent Japanese politics and delivers a focused critical examination of appointive responsibility as a key rhetorical vehicle for tapping into frustrated public expectations of political leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shinzo Abe's return to office as Japanese prime minister in December 2012 offers a rare opportunity to explore how past experience shapes decision-making when leaders are given a second chance at power. There is no doubt that Abe's second term—ending with his re-election for a third term in December 2014—was more successful than his first premiership (2006–2007). What accounts for the differences between Abe's two premierships? In answering this question, I employ an interactionist approach to analyse personal political leadership in institutional and situational contexts. Although previously used by scholars to compare differentleaders, I utilise this approach to identify changes in Abe's leadership between his first and second administrations. I conclude that changes in the institutional and situational contexts of his leadership better explain Abe's second-term successes than developments in his leadership skills. I further conclude that Abe's predominance in his second term calls into question the prevailing view of the Japanese prime minister as institutionally weak. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tenure of Japanese prime ministers is famously short. Between 2006 and 2012 Japan changed prime minister once a year. What factors can explain Japan's revolving-door premiership? To explore this puzzle, this article applies the Leadership Capital Index (LCI) developed by Bennister, 't Hart and Worthy (2015) to case studies of the nine Japanese prime ministers holding office between 2000 and 2015. Leadership capital is the aggregate of leaders' political resources: skills, relations and reputation. The LCI thus allows analysis of the interplay between individual capacities and contextual conditions in determining leaders' ability to gain, maintain and deploy power. The LCI is applied to answer two questions. Firstly, what accounts for the short tenure of many Japanese premiers? In which of the LCI's three leadership dimensions do Japanese leaders lack capital? Secondly, what forms of capital allow some prime ministers to retain office for longer than average (>2 years)? In particular, the article analyses the leadership of Junichiro Koizumi (2001-2006) Japan's longest serving prime minister since the 1970s, and incumbent Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who has held office for three years since December 2012. As well as utilising the LCI to comparatively analyse the tenure of Japan's prime ministers, this article tests the applicability of the Index beyond Western parliamentary democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does the kind of electoral system affect the type of members of parliament appointed to the cabinet in a parliamentary system? The literature on electoral reform has investigated many political consequences of changing an electoral system, but whether appointments to cabinets change too has not been investigated. Conversely, there have been many analyses of cabinet selection but they have not investigated any linkage to the type of electoral system. One reason for this is the lack of theory concerning how electoral systems impact party strategies for ministerial appointments. We suggest that the intervening factor is how parties balance their competing goals of vote-seeking, office-seeking and policy-seeking. If cabinet appointments provide an arena where parties balance these three goals, then we should observe a change in this balancing strategy, and in ministerial appointments, following the introduction of different incentives inherent in a new electoral system. To that end, we conducted an empirical test of Liberal Democratic Party cabinet appointments before and after the 1994 electoral reform. We demonstrate that the change in electoral system led the party to rebalance its priorities and consequently adapt its strategy for ministerial appointments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) and several institutional changes related to the establishment of political leadership as of September 2012, focusing on an analysis of the reported instability caused by then-Japanese Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio's attempts to change the country's bureaucracy. The DPJ's unseating of the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan in 2009 is addressed, as well as information on the DJP's centralization of the governmental decision-making process in the nation's cabinet.

After Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's highly successful rule, Japan saw the five short-lived premierships - Shinzo Abe, Yasuo Fukuda, Taro Aso, Yukio Hatoyama, and Naoto Kan - over the period of five years (2006-11). This article aims to identify the causes of this unusually high frequency of Japan's leadership changes in recent times. Specifically, it finds that all post-Koizumi prime ministers lost power after a short tenure by following the same pattern of demise that was characterized by a rapid fall of approval rate in the media's polls. It argues that they fell into this pattern of failure for the same three reasons: their failure in economic policy; their poor leadership ability derived from the vanishing of the traditional career path to premiership; their unstable intraparty foothold caused by the transition from candidate-centered election to party-centered election. It argues that the politics under the Koizumi and post-Koizumi cabinets share important undercurrents despite their apparent differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prime Minister Koizumi succeeded in strengthening the prime minister's role in the LDP's policymaking, although he largely failed to undercut traditional bureaucratic strength. His success resulted not only from personal factors but also the structural changes occurring in LDP politics since the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the political drama surrounding Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro is a direct result of the political reforms implemented in Japan during the last decade. The new rules of the game have produced a structural force pushing Japan to resemble a Westminster system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]