“Adapting” a Policy Ideal

A Sociological Analysis of Policy-Making Process in Child Protection

Abstract

This analysis seeks to understand how and why policy ideals are translated into policies by political actors involved in decision-making at the mezzo-level through examining the policy-making process of two policies which seem to share the same basic principles. One is the Child Protection Program which was implemented as a national policy by the wartime Japanese government. The other is the Child Welfare Law enacted in the Postwar Reform Era. This paper aims to clarify the relation between these two policies.
Under the influence of macro socioeconomic and political factors, political actors involved in decision-making at the mezzo-level “adapted” past policy ideals and concepts in an attempt to garner support for the policies they were trying to push. In the process, the actual contents of the “adapted” policies underwent considerable transformation. Here, “adapting” a policy ideal refers to the importing and exploitation in policy debates of similar terms which originally expressed the principles or ideals of policies from a different context. The term “adapting” reflects the deliberate nature of the actors' behavior, and enables us to understand the process of policy-making through making sense of the actors' underlying motives.
In conclusion, this paper argues that the central ideal of the two child welfare-related policies mentioned above were “adapted” from a policy debated in the early 1920's for different issues, under different systems of decision-making and with different motives.