自民党長期政権下における政府買入米価の決定過程

抄録

Agricultural policy affects not only the agricultural sector but the whole economy or society. Many people have been saying that decision-making in agricultural policy in Japan is often politically motivated. But there are few studies that clarify the key political determinants in the policy-making process. The purpose of this paper is to show that there is a political factor in the decision-making process of the producer's rice price under the 1955 system by a quantitative approach.
This analysis had four steps. The first step was to trace the change of the calculation method of the producer's rice price in detail. The second step was to develop a model which considered the political negotiations based on a theory of politics. The third step was to create two original indexes, of which one was the Gap Index of the Producer's Rice Price, which evaluated the impact of the political negotiations on the price level, and the other was the Rural Represen-tatives of the Government Party Index (RGI), which quantified political power. The final step was to conduct a multiple linear regression analysis using data from 1960 to 1993. In this study the RGI was used as one of variables in addition to the economic variables used in past studies.
The results of regression analyses showed that the RGI significantly affected the policy-making process and therefore validated the original assumption that the political variable was an important factor in the policy-making process.
This study attempted to quantify political power in the decision-making process, which was previously thought intangible. As a result of this study it should be possible to apply a similar analysis when we conduct research on other decision-making processes.