Assessing the Effects of Executive Agency Reforms in Dominant-Party Systems: Political Leadership and the Survival of Executive Agencies in Japan

This paper aims to provide new theoretical and empirical insights into the effects of agencification in relation to political leadership within different party political systems. Executive agencies have been studied in several countries. In particular, studies of UK Next Step Agencies report two notable effects: first, agencies tend to be reorganized alongside political changes; second, the closed, life-long civil service career system is often altered as the hiring of CEOs for agencies is extended to externals. These features could be widely applicable in countries where there are two or multiple party systems alongside regular changes of government; however, there has been little discussion of whether the same effects can be expected in countries where governmental change is not regular due to a single party dominating the democratic governance of the state (e.g. Japan, Singapore, Hungary). Even in such countries, political leaders, and members of core executives in particular, commonly prefer agenficiation as a tool of public service reforms; hence research in this area needs to take account of how states with more static political systems affect the outcomes of agencification. Accordingly, this paper will explore the following questions: how does the relationship between political leadership and the core executive, and bureaucratic autonomy develop through agencification in countries where there is not regular governmental change, and, in particular, countries whose democratic electoral systems are dominated by a single party in the long term; what are the causes of structural changes to agencies in this context; and how has the traditional career system for high-ranking officials been preserved via agencification? To address these questions, this paper will provide a systematic review of existing studies and theorize the effects of agencification in relation to different types of party systems. As a case study, this paper refers to the Japanese experience of executive agencies (i.e. Incorporated Administrative Agencies (IAAs)), established by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) government in 2001. Whereas IAAs originally imitated the UK Next Step Agencies, their effects are significantly different from those reported in existing studies that focused on political systems that undergo regular change: specifically, they tend not to change alongside other political developments such as cabinet reshuffles, and the system for appointing CEOs is used as a revolving door for senior civil servants in the parental departments, thus rather maintaining the life-long career system. By highlighting such differences, this paper will therefore contribute to the development of a comparative framework for understanding agencification in countries with differing party systems.