What factors facilitate policy termination? This article addresses this problem by examining the termination processes of two pension systems in Japan; the pension for members of the Diet, and the pension for members of local assembly. Using the paired-comparison method and process-tracing technique, I show that; (1) economic reasoning did not necessarily accelerate termination process; (2) as previous studies have demonstrated, political factors had profound effects on the abolishment of the two pension systems; (3) the adoption of interim measures lead to the successful termination. The article concludes by suggesting that these findings invite further investigation into policy termination mechanism.

Public interest incorporated associations’ reform which came into force in 2008 terminated the old law which associated Authorization of “public interest” with incorporation. It follows that former public interest incorporated associations have to be reviewed if they deserved the privilege under the name of “public interest”, and it increases the accessibility for non-profit organizations to obtain the status of legal entity.

It had already argued about the necessity of giving legal status to non-profit organizations without authorization of “public interest”. Though the non-profit organizations could acquire status of legal entity easily by establishing the Act to Promote Specified Non-profit Activities (NPO law) enacted in 1998, the nonprofit organizations without regard to “public interest” at all had to wait for the Intermediate Corporation Law Established in 2001 to acquire the status. In the public interest incorporated associations’ reform of 2000s, the determinations which aim to separate authorization of “public interest” from the legal status in the existing associations were advanced from a viewpoint of administrative reform.

It can be understood that a series of legislation is the political processes involving “public interest”. Though the Liberal Democratic Party, which ruled for a long time, tried to understand “public interest” as restrictively as possible, the other political party caught “public interest” widely, and asked for comprehensive reform of the nonprofit corporation system. Having been carried out as part of administrative reform applied limitation to the reform. However, it is expected that the political process involving future “public interest” will be changed by this reform coupled with the transfer of power having been realized in 2009.

Why was the system of special revenue sources for roads projects such as the gasoline tax terminated and changed to a general revenue source in 2009? Why does the budget allocation in the public works projects not change in spite of the termination of the system of special revenue sources for road projects? The purpose of this study is to ascertain the driving forces of policy termination through analyzing the reasons that special revenue sources used for road projects was changed to a general revenue source in 2009.

First, based on previous studies regarding policy termination, this study clarified the difficulty of the termination of special revenue sources for road projects. Then, this study focused on the effects of actors who did not gain benefits from existing policies and opposed it as factors in policy termination. In particular, by referring to the idea of Baumgartner and Jones (2009), this study highlights actors’ acquisition and utilization of positions from which they can formally express their opinions in decision-making to break the equilibrium between an actor who benefitted from existing policy to the actor that sought to change it.

This study further shows that if actors who insisted on the status quo compromised with actors who proposed the termination of special revenue sources for roads projects policy termination is realized. Actors who proposed the termination, including Prime Minister Koizumi and DPJ, used the systems to alter the behavior of actors who opposed the generalization. For this pourpose, they introduced a term limit for the chairman of the roads investigation committee in the LDP or they used the gridlocked Diet and the expiration date of laws that had to be reauthorized to fund the source of roads improvement Moreover, this study concludes that the termination of special revenue sources for roads projects was not completed at once. Instead, the termination was realized by gradual change through by actor’s trial and error over the course of many years. In addition, this study pointed out the influences of multiple policy layer and relevancy on policy termination, followed by result of the case study that the effects of termination of special revenue sources for road projects are limited because of the existence of other systems and plans to implement the road projects.

This article clarifies how a local public hospital’s termination occurs. Preceding studies stress that political actors’ attitudes or the characteristics of the policy determine whether policy will be terminated. Politicians object to a local public hospital’s termination on the basis of local residents· objections. Moreover, these hospitals are difficult to terminate because they provide employment to their staff. However, some local public hospitals have ceased operations in recent years. Why did this happen?

This article focuses on the influence of a hospital’s raison d’être. When on the basis of their policy knowledge, a council determines that there is no raison d’être for a hospital, political actors find it difficult to oppose its termination because of the possibility that voters will judge the political actor as not having worked for the public interest. This article analyzes the reformation of Fukuoka Prefecture’s public hospital. This is the least-likely crucial case, as most of these hospital’s operations have terminated. Yet, this case study shows how a council’s opinion changed political actors· attitudes and led to a local public hospital’s termination.

In Japan, when government introduced the policy evaluation system, many students of the policy evaluation and administrators did not think about policy termination. Then politicians and government officials thought about how the governments use the evaluation results for budgeting every year. As Japanese government rarely terminated goalless policies and programs outdated, when the central governments were changed in September 2009, so policies of Liberal democratic party survived. Mass media and many students of politics said ‘nothing changes’. This is right. However, this is because policy evaluations and program evaluations did not change ex-government’s policies and terminate programs.

By the way, in Japan, governments have introduced the strange policy evaluation systems, the systems became performance measurement system or output measurement. Sometimes we can see activity-based output monitoring in policy evaluation systems of Japan. Still, many officials in central government, local governments, and politicians confuse and mistake policy evaluation for performance measurement or output monitoring. This makes Japanese government un-accountable. We should look for the correct policy evaluation again, to terminate policies and make governments accountable.

The change of public service production has been caused by transformation of life risk structure and danger of the sustainability of welfare state, in globalization and post-industrialization. Various perspectives are presented by many scholars―governance, welfare mix, and co-production. A number of municipalities advocate the collaboration of their citizen since 1990s · in Japan. Many cities institutionalized neighborhood government as the system of the public service production by the residents. They expect that citizens improve their mutual cooperation for elderly care, child care, disaster prevention and crime prevention. Japanese neighborhood government consists of not only decision making body but also executive body, which organizes neighborhood associations. This article examines the neighborhood government in Miyazaki city. City government provides the subsidies to their 21 neighborhood governments. People tackle local problems more than before. But in contrast, there is a tendency to immobilize their projects due to the power of the old style neighborhood associations. One neighborhood government begins production of small scale social service, bypassing the influence of the neighborhood associations. Residents recognize the importance of agenda setting, decision focusing on the future, and combination of mobilization and volunteer. The case study of this article shows the reaction of the straddling civil society in reconstruction of public service provision.

Do ordinance-designated cities, as the implementation units for livelihood protection policy in Japan, influence policy outputs? In other words, do those acting at the city level have room for discretion in the implementation process? If so, who are they and how do they do this? These have been the major questions in the controversy between central and local governments since Koizumi’ s subsidy reform. Academically, it is known as the implementation gap problem, in which policy changes during the implementation process and deviates from the original goal.

This study develops a model that integrates three approaches in policy implementation studies: the top-down approach, bottom-up approach and streetlevel bureaucracy. Hypotheses derived from the model are examined through panel data analysis of protection rates in ordinance-designated cities. Results demonstrate that street-level caseworkers who are in charge of the livelihood protection policy exercise their discretion based on standard operating procedure (SOP) and professionalism.

The cost-effectiveness analysis is the common criterion of evaluation in methods for the control of public works when we evaluate public works before it starts or when we evaluate it after completion. In road projects, I compare the result of the cost-effectiveness analysis in the case where road construction will have been completed with the result of the cost-effectiveness analysis in the case where road construction will not start. Concretely speaking, I analysis and evaluate road projects by calculating the sum of benefits and expenses in a fixed period and comparing the increase of expenses with the increase of benefits.

I found the problem by analyzing precedents that the area of the traffic volume network was unclear and expenses didn't include the environmental value, etc. Tokyo bar association proposed that the court must add the cost-effectiveness analysis to the factors for rulings and analyze cases fairly.

I came to the conclusion that the court must examine especially the rationality of the grounds of benefit and the cost-effectiveness analysis manual must be improved by including the environmental value, etc. when we use the costeffectiveness analysis to control public works.

Little research applies the theory of administrative responsibility to actual cases. While the concepts of Carl J. Friedrich and Herman Finer are broadly accepted, their validity must be proved through a consideration of real world examples. This article takes nuclear energy policy as such an instance. Since nuclear energy policy is referred to as “national policy, but private management,” it is inextricably associated with nuclear energy officials. Therefore, calling such officials to account contributes to policy accountability. The involvement of broad-based actors in public affairs makes it difficult, however, to control them through a top-down (principal-agent) approach. Relatedly, the path dependency commonly observed in advanced technology brings a lock-in effect to nuclear energy policy that functions as an obstructive factor in ensuring accountability. Under these circumstances, professionals have contributed to the enhancement of legitimacy. Instead of democratic controls, professionals have maintained answerability. In this respect, the notion of “functional responsibility” is regarded by Friedrich as foundational; however, the severe accident at Fukushima has revealed the weakness of functional responsibility. How did professional accountability fail? We consider the process that embodies this dilemma for the theory of administrative responsibility through the Fukushima experience.

This paper aims to investigate the policy on the long-term evaluation of earthquake occurrence conducted by the Headquarters for Earthquake Research Promotion (HERP) of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), Japan. The purpose is to clarify whether the occurrence of the 2011 off the Pacific coast of Tohoku Earthquake, which caused severe damages over wide areas through tsunami, was expected or not by the long-term evaluation before the earthquake. The minutes of the steering committee of HERP indicate that the routine method to calculate the stochastic probability of the earthquake occurrence failed to predict the earthquake. However, with the recent paleo-seismological findings that the Tohoku coastal regions were hit by tsunami several times during the past 3000 years, the HERP committee did realize that there might be another tsunami accompanied by large earthuuake in the future, but not confirm when because of little scientific clues available.

At present, US military is stationed in Japan based on the Japan-US Security Treaty. There are civilians, called “USFJ employees”, working on the US military bases.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the existence of USFJ employees on the basis of treaty and to calculate economic effect on Okinawa brought by USFJ employees by input-output analysis method. USFJ employees brought 110.092 billion yen-economic effect to Okinawa in 2006. This amount occupies 1.9 % of 5 trillion and 766.8 billion yen for total Okinawa’s prefectural production in 2005.

As mentioned above, US military bases create a number of jobs for Okinawa which has a higher unemployment rate than the national average.

On the other hand, it is expected that US military transformation including site return of Futenma base will bring larger economic effect than ever by effectively utilizing these returned sites, so in the latter half of this paper, I overview the US military transformation and calculate USFJ employees’ economic loss caused by the base site return. Additionally, I analyze precedents for the site development and industries that Okinawa should develop in the future, and then discuss whether or not newly created job opportunities could be provided to USFJ employees even if base site return were actually conducted.

The contribution of this paper is to offer a Quantitative point of view on the controversy over Okinawa’s US military base-related problems in terms of USFJ employees.

This paper aims at clarifying the impact of “macro” level factors such as institutional factors, political factors, and socioeconomic environment on the work motivation of local government officials.

Past studies reveal that demographics and subjective cognition affect the work motivation of local officials. However, not only these “micro” level factors, but also “macro” level factors should affect the motivation of local officials. In fact, the “macro” factors seem to influence the “micro” factors. For example, the mayor would be an important factor in shaping the work motivation of municipal government officials. The mayor as a leader of municipal government would set a goal of each government and organize the government to achieve his or her goal. The political leader can change work environment according to his or her preference. Therefore political leadership would be an important factor in work motivation of local officials. In this sense, it is necessary to consider such “macro” factors in the analysis which past studies have not fully examined. This paper will fill this gap in past research.

In this paper we clarify the impact of macro level factors by focusing on municipalities in Japan. The Japanese central government has decentralized their work to local governments. As a result, municipal governments in Japan now provide much more civil services than before. This change increases the burden of municipal officials, and so municipal workers stress out more and more over the workload. In this sense, Japanese case is ideal for examining the impact of macro factor on the work motivation. We examine how “macro” level factors affect the work motivation based on the analysis of a sample survey of municipal officials at major cities in Japan with using multilevel modeling.

This paper introduces an uninvestigated category of citizen participation:‘citizen participation as the conduct by an involved actor’ where citizen play an indispensable role in policy achievement. Waste management policy is analyzed as a typical example of this kind.

The rules uniformly applied to the every section of a local government like the system guaranteeing citizen participation are generally planned by the head or the central supervising section of the government. Sections directly operating public services follow the rules after settled. This top-down decision making process is described in this paper using the example of information disclosure regulations introduced by local governments in the 1980s.

Though this top-down procedure of decision making seems well-adopted in local governments, we could ask this question: do the sections of a local government directly operating services have no needs or incentives of their own to promote citizen participation regardless of the existence of a top-down rule? The surveys by the author concerning municipal solid waste (MSW) management reveal that local waste management sections have earnestly tried to involve citizens into policy-making. Local governments researched as well as citizens interviewed give us proofs of this trend.

Local waste management sections cannot but involve citizens not only into the policy operation yet into the decision making since citizens as both consumers and waste dischargers arc the indispensable party of essential actors in productlife-cycles where products are transformed into waste by citizens.

Lastly this paper further illustrates ‘citizen participation as the conduct by an involved actor’ with two other examples: compulsory education and local policies closely related to a neighborhood association (chounaikai).

In the fields of international trade policy, international trade policy effect on not only trade industry but also none-trade industry. In recent years, activities of WTO (World Trade Organization) has slowed down and, instead of WTO, FTAs (free trade agreement) are promoted among industrialized countries and emerging countries. However Japan cannot promote FTA enough because of protecting domestic low productivity industries such as agriculture.

Under such circumstances, I analyzed deliberations of 2007 on approval of a treaty agreement by the Japanese Diet. I extracted all parliamentarians’ statements of 2007 including words related to FTA. And I counted number of statements including FTA and words of the statements, and analyzed what kind of words mentioned with the word of FTA. This analysis was calculated by political parties. In addition, I had interview surveys with 13 parliamentarians.

As a result, I could point out “deliberations in the Diet are comprehensively negative for promoting FTA” and “especially statements by major parties about agriculture as well as statements by small parties about foreign worker acceptance such as aged person supporters are very negative.”