Reassessing Delegations under Parliamentary System: Japanese Prime Ministerial Power and Special Assignment Ministers

Delegating responsibilities among diverse political actors has attracted much scholarly attention in political science. Research has delved into analyzing delegation within parliamentary systems using a principal-agent model (Ramseyer and Rosenbluth 1993, Strom 2003). Conventional wisdom suggests that delegations in parliamentary systems are straightforward and unilateral. In essence, the parliamentary system involves a series of delegations among various actors, each relationship resembling that of a principal and an agent. The first chain of delegation starts from the voters to the legislators, the second from the legislators to the prime minister, then from the prime minister to the ministers, and lastly from the ministers to the public officials. In this hierarchy, it is assumed that the prime minister delegates to ministers who act as heads of departments. Challenging this conventional wisdom, this paper demonstrates that the Japanese prime minister does not delegate formulation of important policies to department head ministers. Instead, he predominantly delegates important policies to the minister with special assignments lacking authority to lead departments. Following the government reform of 2001, the Japanese prime minister gained the flexibility to choose between department head ministers and ministers with special assignments when delegating authority for policy formulations. This paper elucidates how this reform broadened legal authority of the Japanese prime minister while concurrently bolstering the power of the Cabinet Secretariat in supporting the prime minister. Moreover, it illustrates a shift in the prime minister’s delegation strategy. It emphasizes that the prime minister increasingly delegates important policies to ministers with special assignments more than before. In making such delegations, the prime minister tasks ministers with special assignments to use officials in the Cabinet Secretariat. This paper explains why the prime minister makes such delegation, drawing insights from American politics. Findings from American politics point out that the US president delegates crucial policy formulations to the White House rather than department secretaries. Similarly, the Japanese prime minister favors the ministers with special assignment because he can project more efficient oversight in two ways. First, the prime minister can consolidate policies in different areas into one minister. Second, as special assignment ministers must rely on bureaucrats in the Cabinet Secretariat. Given the prime minister's control over this organization as its head, the prime minister can effectively monitor the bureaucracy under the ministers. Concluding, the paper explores the implications of the Japanese case on delegations within parliamentary systems at large. It contends that prime ministers may delegate policy formulations to ministers and have them use the office which directly reports to prime ministers instead of delegating to department heads. In other words, the Japanese case demonstrates that even in parliamentary system prime ministers make policy delegations a similar fashion as presidents in separation of power system to have close oversight over policies.