Delegation to Multiple Agents in Parliamentary Systems: A Comparative Study of the American Presidential System, the Japanese Parliamentary System, and the British Parliamentary System

Political scientists have long focused on the issue of delegation in research on representative democracies. In representative democracies, policies formulation results from a series of delegations among various actors. A central question in previous research is how a principal can control his/her agents in order to protect his/her interests when delegating his/her authorities. Most of the existing research focus on four major means as devices to control agents, screening, monitoring, institutional checks, and design of rules. Despite extensive research one question remains to be further explored: How does a principal choose his/her agent when he or she has the option to delegate his/her authority to multiple institution? While this issue is well recognized as an issue of multiple agents in studies s of the American presidential system, it has not rigorously examined in the context of parliamentary systems. In the American presidential system, principals -- most notably the president -- have multiple agents to delegate their political authorities. By contrast conventional wisdom suggests that delegation under the parliamentary system is simple and unilateral. Nevertheless, the issue of multiple agents may also emerge in parliamentary systems, warranting further investigation. This paper demonstrates has two main objectives. Firstly, it demonstrates that the issue of multiple agents can arise even in parliamentary systems and argues that the logic derived from the American presidential system can be applied to explain calculations by the prime minister in making decisions on delegations. To illustrate this, the paper conducts a case study on the Japanese parliamentary system. Since 2001, Japanese prime minister have had the option of delegating policy formulation responsibilities either to department ministers or to the Cabinet Secretariat, which functions similarly to the Prime Minister’s Office. Much like the US presidents who often prefer to delegate key policy decisions to the White House, this paper demonstrates that Japanese prime ministers have increasingly preferred to delegate important policies to the Cabinet Secretary rather than to department ministers. Second, it examines the factors that lead prime ministers delegate important policy decisions to the institution such as the Prime Minister’s Office which directly reports to them. By comparing the British Japanese parliamentary systems, it argues that the relatively weaker powers held by the Japanese prime minister -- as both head of the government as well as the leader of a majority party – paradoxically resulted in the creation of a system enabling the Japanese prime minister to delegate significant policy responsibilities to the Cabinet Secretariat (PMO).