Organizer and Chair: Verena Blechinger, German Institute for Japanese Studies, Tokyo
Discussants: Arnold Heidenheimer, Washington University, St. Louis; Werner Pascha, Mercator University, Duisburg
Political corruption and its elimination are central issues in the on-going debate on political reform in Japan. When the long-term, one-party rule of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) ended in 1993 after a series of corruption scandals, several coalition governments debated measures to reduce the amount of corruption in Japan’s political system and to create a ‘cleaner’ relationship between money and politics. In 1994, a package of reform laws was inaugurated in order to reduce corruption. These laws not only created a new electoral system and a public subsidy program for political parties, they also established stricter regulations for political donations. While the new regulations still contain loopholes which will enable further corruption scandals in the future, the structural environment of political corruption in Japan has changed.
The presentations in this panel will analyze the situation four years after the political reform laws passed. The focus will be on three issues: the changing relationship between money and politics during election campaigns (Reed), the strategies of Japanese coalition governments for the handling of corruption scandals (Blechinger) and the criminal prosecution of political corruption (Johnson).
New Rites of Purification? The Handling of Political Corruption Scandals Under Japanese Coalition Governments Since 1993
Verena K. Blechinger, German Institute for Japanese Studies
For every democratic government, the handling of political corruption scandals necessitates skillful crisis management. While public demands for a thorough investigation of the scandal and punishment of the corrupt actors have to be met to preserve public trust and to keep the government in power, it is also important to contain the scandal and to prevent an escalation. A key government strategy to handle corruption scandals is the use of the media. Media coverage of public hearings and reports about the current status of an investigation offers the impression of a robust political system and thus, in the long run, can restore public trust.
This paper analyzes the strategies of Japanese governments to cope with political corruption scandals. After a brief description of the handling of corruption cases under LDP long-term one-party rule, special attention will be given to the approaches of the various coalition governments since 1993. The focus will be on the media strategy adopted by the governments in order to restore trust in government and in the political system. It will be argued that while the LDP one-party governments presented incidents of corruption as problems of individual politicians and strove to quickly return to "business as usual," the ensuing coalition cabinets used corruption scandals as a reason to initiate a broad public discussion process on political reform and a restructuring of the political system.
Electoral Reform and Money Politics in Japan
Steven Reed, Chuo University, Tokyo
Predicting the effect of electoral reform on party and candidate strategic behavior is easy compared to trying to predict how political reform will affect the relationship between money and politics. If the law says that whoever gets the most votes in a given district is declared elected, that is what happens and there is no way around it. On the other hand, if the law says that companies are not allowed to provide free services to candidates and cannot contribute more than a certain amount of money to their campaigns, we can be certain that the law will be ignored to some degree and that the participants will find ways around the intent of the law. Nevertheless, changing the rules of the political game always affects behavior, though not necessarily as intended. Moreover, campaigning in the 1996 general election and 1998 House of Councillors election clearly differed from the past.
In this paper, I will review the changes already evident in the relationship between money and politics in Japan and try to predict how that relationship will evolve in the future. Though my primary concern will be the effects of the political reforms of 1994, I will also discuss how changes in Japanese society, voting behavior and campaign practices are affecting the relationship between money and politics in Japan.
The Prosecution of Political Corruption in Japan, the U.S., Italy and South Korea
David T. Johnson, University of Hawaii, Manoa
In order to prosecute corruption crimes successfully, prosecutors need some measure of independence from the target of their investigation. In order to ensure that they exercise their powers responsibly, prosecutors must be held democratically accountable. This paper focuses on the tension between these two imperatives—independence and accountability—in corruption prosecutions in Japan, the U.S., Italy, and South Korea. It first describes how independence and accountability vary across these four countries, and then explores the causes and consequences of that variation. Since corruption is an unquantified (and perhaps unquantifiable) phenomenon, it may be impossible to say which prosecution system best reduces corruption. In the absence of quantitative measures, the success of a prosecution regime may get measured in terms of its symbolic impact.