THE GOVERNMENT OF MODERN JAPAN: THE JAPANESE DIET (PARLIAMENT) The Role of the Diet in Policymaking and Legislation |
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Gerald L. Curtis :: This system in Japan, where legislation is mostly written by bureaucrats and submitted to the Diet by the cabinet, and in which the committees themselves draft very little in the way of legislation, is actually not as unusual as many people might think. In most parliamentary systems, most legislation is submitted to the parliament in the form of cabinet bills. The United States is very unusual in that the Congress drafts a lot of legislation, drafts legislation itself, but that’s not usually the case with parliamentary systems. What makes the Japanese system different from other parliamentary systems is that politicians play not as big a role in drafting the legislation or in overseeing the drafting of legislation that the bureaucrats write up, that has been submitted in the form of cabinet bills. So one of the issues in Japan today is how would it change the system to give politicians and to give the Diet more power over the policy process, and to reduce the power of the bureaucracy. One of the problems that Japan has in giving politicians more power over the policy process is that politicians do not have the kinds of staff support in Japan that they have in the United States. And political parties don't have the kind of staff support that they have in countries like Britain and Germany and other countries in Europe, where individual politicians generally don't have large staffs, but the political parties have staffs that are able to draft legislation and to help their members engage directly in the political process. So the role of the Diet in Japanese politics is somewhat different from the role of parliaments in other political systems. Its role in actually making legislation is, of course, less than it is in the United States, but it is also less than it is in other parliamentary systems. |
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