Focus on the problem of selecting policy approaches to the theme of plastic shopping bag reduction policies have been carried out in the world, what reduction techniques that either are chosen, the advantages and disadvantages of each economic entity for each reduction techniques I was carried out on its preference ranking shown. Thereby, in the decision-making process actually must consider the advantages and disadvantages that must continue to solve for the distribution problem different from efficiency became clear. And voluntary agreements that have been adopted in the plastic shopping bag reduction policy in Japan got the conclusion that can serve as an effective complementary method to solve these problems.

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The purpose of this paper is to summarize Japanese constitutional scholars' arguments on the theory of democracy. This paper illustrates how mainstream constitutional scholars talk democracy - especially, national sovereignty and popular sovereignty, constitutional democracy and majoritarian democracy, or direct democracy and indirect democracy. On the standpoint of deliberative democracy, holding public referendum about public policy is never desirable. Even though it has no legal binding force, public vote without any parliamentary discussion inhibits representatives' self-directive deliberation.

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The idea of using randomly selected citizens in political will-formation has stimulated democratic innovations called Mini-publics since the last decade of the 20th century. Citizen juries, planning cell, consensus conferences, and deliberative poll are known as such methods. While they are different in many respects, they share two fundamental assumptions: 1) randomly selected citizens, i.e. mini-publics, achieve better representation than election, and 2) mini-publics can be practical surrogates of ideal speech situation, where deliberation proceeds along communicative ethics. These are the assumptions which cannot be justified a priori. The representativeness and the deliberative quality of minipublics should be empirically examined. In this study, I will review the evaluation studies on Deliberative Poll and compare the result of Kanagawa DP experiment. In particular, a method to analyze ”inter-subjective rationality„ is developed and it is shown that the level of inter-subjective rationality has been increased in the case of Kanagawa DP. Then, finally, the possibility of deliberative democracy using mini-publics is discussed further.

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This article aims to survey democratic theories and thereby discuss the relationship between deliberative democracy and public choice. There have been various democratic theories, however, Schumpeterian, or aggregative, democracy has been the predominant theory. This theory assumes that democracy is equated to elections through which fixed preferences of actors who behave to maximize their own interests are aggregated. Yet, since the 1990s, deliberative democracy has been the most potent competitor theory against aggregative democracy. Under the assumption of deliberative democracy, actors may change their own preferences through deliberation by which they persuade others by considering others' preferences and society. In short, aggregative and deliberative democracies do not share the same assumption. In public choice, there are many studies on aggregative democracy, while few on deliberative democracy exist because the assumption of actors and decision process does not neatly fit with public choice. However, some studies on deliberation employ public choice methods, especially the game-theoretic approach. Yet, there is a heated debate as to whether the game - theoretic studies (implicitly public choice) on deliberation are appropriate. Is it impossible to study deliberative democracy in public choice? This article discusses the future direction of the relationship between deliberative democracy and public choice.

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One of the fundamental roles of a legislature is to deliberate bills. Therefore, the amount of time legislators spend on deliberation is important in evaluating a legislature's workload. However, previous studies on the legislative process have overlooked the variation in the total amount of legislative time among and within legislatures. In this study, using the panel data of 47 Japanese prefectural assemblies from 1967 through 2006, I empirically investigate the determinants of the total amount of legislative time within legislatures. Consequently, I find that assemblies under divided governments or those fragmented into many factions tend to spend more legislative days in plenary sessions and committee meetings. Furthermore, the influence of factions on the legislative timetable depends on how much they control the scheduling power, e.g., the members of the Committee of Rules and Administration or the chairs of other committees.

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The Great East Japan Earthquake, which occurred on March 11, 2011, was a natural catastrophe. The triple disaster of the earthquake, tsunami, and the nuclear plant accident devastated a range of facilities in the Tohoku area. The government should provide appropriate assistance and establish the required systems for reconstruction, but the prospect of revitalizing the disaster-affected regions is still uncertain. In the autumn of 2011, I and some researchers conducted in Sendai, where is a base city of the revival. Using this data, I examine about the background of the evaluation of the reconstruction policy. I found that the evaluation of the policy performance of the local government is higher than that of central government and the person that damage is heavy tends to have low opinion of reconstruction policy performance.

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The purpose of this paper is to examine the policy process of recovery plan and reconstruction policy from Higashi-Nihon Great Earthquake. I would like to point out that there are four opinions against the recovery plans and reconstruction policies from public choice view. 1)Time schedule of recovery plan and reconstruction policy. These are not clearly separation. It is necessary to implementation the recovery plans and reconstruction policies at the same time. 2)Scope of reconstruction policies. It is essential to distinguish the policy issues of before the earthquake disaster and the policy issues of after the earthquake disaster. 3)Relationship to rent and earthquake diseases. Earthquake diseases may cause rent seeking activity. 4)The role of Government and Market. It is not necessarily a role of the government to implement the recovery plan and the reconstruction policy. Market oriented policies are sometimes effective. For example, rent subsidy program intended to private rental house is effective to supply a permanent house than building it by local government.

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In the disaster area of the Great East Japan Earthquake, local residents disagree over the huge seawall plan proposed by the prefecture government. The prefecture government presented the huge seawall plan in order to protect a human life and an asset from a big tidal wave of the level 1, which is based on the Coast Law and the guideline shown by the national government committee. The denizens who mainly perform fi shery and tourism near a coast are opposed to a huge seawall because it becomes impossible to look at their sea with that. In this paper, we arrange and compare the costs and the benefits brought by a huge seawall and then explain that the opportunity costs pictured by denizens differ from what a government considers. The Coast Law specifies that, when building a seawall, a government should take into consideration not only protection of a coast but also environment protection and utility value with a coast, and furthermore a government should ask to denizens' opinion to refl ect it to a planning. Although a reconstruction project requires speed, it should be advanced on the assumption of denizens' consensus. We propose the reexamining process of the seawall plan according to the law system.

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