Comparative Policy Process
Faculty
Fumiaki Kubo, Ariyoshi Ogawa, Kunihiro Wakamatsu
Description
This course will address policy process, broadly defined, from a comparative perspective. The countries that will be picked up for a case study this year are the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Scandinavian countries. Some of the important topics are as follows; the institutional framework that constrains the behavioral pattern of the actors, the characteristics and the nature of bureaucracy, political culture, the contour and functions of political parties and interest groups, the capacity and expertise of the public and private sectors to manufacture policy ideas such as think tanks and interest groups, and the historical background of each country or each policy area.
The objectives of the course are not just to study the policy process of the countries that are addressed here, but also to let the students be exposed to models and theories of comparative politics so far as policy process is concerned. In addition, implicit in almost all the explanations in class is the comparison with the policy process of Japan. Therefore, students are expected to have a keen understanding of the Japanese policy process. Also crucial is the fact that policy process is all the more important if it is directly related to the substance of the policy.
In the first part of the lecture, Professor Fumiaki Kubo will be in charge of explaining the policy process of the United States, with special emphasis on a mechanism of producing new policy ideas while selecting budget, welfare, environment, and agriculture for case studies.
Then, Professor Ariyoshi Ogawa will describe how policy is made and implemented in the Northern European countries such as Sweden, paying special attention to reform in governance in the form of decentralization and re-centralization, the harmonization of welfare state with the EU standard, and environmental politics.
In the last part, Professor Kunihiro Wakamatsu will discuss the British policy process, introducing theoretical concepts such as core executive and policy network, and overviewing the features of the political institutions like the cabinet, the office of prime minister, and the parliament.