The U.S. Political System

Hello, we're going to talk about American politics, and I want to focus today on five ways in which American politics is different from Japanese politics. Number one, the U.S. has a presidential system, whereas Japan has a parliamentary system. What that means is that the American president is elected directly by the people. The Japanese prime minister, in contrast, is elected by the Diet. So that means that the election of the American president is separate from the election of Congress, the House of Representatives, and the Senate. So the president is elected every four years, the House of Representatives every two years, and the Senate every six years. That in turn means that it's possible to have what we call divided government in the United States. What that means is that you have a president who is from one party, and a Congress, that could be the House of Representatives or the Senate, might be from a different party. And that will make it harder for them to get things done. In contrast, in Japan, the prime minister is directly elected by the Diet. So that means that the lower house and the prime minister are always from the same party or the same group of parties. So it's easier to get legislation through the Diet than maybe it is to get it through Congress in the United States. Second, in the US, we have a separation of powers versus, in Japan, a partial fusion of powers. So let me explain what that means. Just like Japan, the US has three main branches of government, the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary. So in the US case, the executive would be the president, the members of cabinet, that would be like the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, et cetera, the staff for the White House, and all of the different agencies. So that would be like the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Commerce. All of that together is the executive branch. The legislative branch is the House of Representatives plus the Senate. The judicial branch is the Supreme Court and then all the different layers of federal courts below the Supreme Court. So those are the three branches. But when the US founders created the Constitution, they were really thinking that they wanted to have checks and balances between these different branches. So that's one of the kind of grounding philosophies of American politics is that no one branch should be too powerful, and each branch would kind of check the power of the other one. Now I said that there's a separation in the US politics, whereas there's a partial fusion in Japanese politics. So let me explain what that means. Any person in the American government belongs to one of these branches and not any of the others. But in the Japanese case, the members of the cabinet are both part of the executive branch and part of the legislative branch. In other words, diet members in Japan can also be ministers, state ministers, like the Minister of Defense or the Minister of Economic Trade and Industry, right? Whereas in the United States, a congressperson can never be a member of the cabinet. So if the president says, oh, I want this congressperson to be a member of my cabinet to become Secretary of Defense, for example, that person has to quit Congress and then join the cabinet separately. Another difference in terms of the separation of powers is that the power of each of these branches is relatively equal in the United States. So they really are checks on each other, whereas in the Japanese case, the executive branch is the most powerful. On this topic, the Japanese system is really more common, right? It's more common to have a strong executive branch, whereas the US rough balance between the three branches is actually quite distinctive. Third, let's talk about how you pass a bill. In the United States, if you want to pass a bill or a law, what you do is it begins in Congress. So a senator or a member of the House of Representatives, or both together sometimes, will propose legislation. That proposed bill will then go to a congressional committee, right? And then it will go to the full House and the full Senate. And sometimes it has to pass both chambers. So sometimes there are negotiations between the two chambers. If it passes both the House and the Senate, then it goes to the president. The president either signs the bill or he vetoes the bill, and then it has to go back to Congress for more work. In Japan, the bills typically, there is such a thing as a diet member sponsored bill. But most legislation in Japan starts in the ministries. So for instance, the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare might say, oh, we want to do a certain kind of law, right? And so they actually draft the law, and then it goes to the diet, the diet committee, then the full diet, and then it finally becomes law. So in the Japanese case, the passage rate of legislation is very high. Partly that's because the prime minister and the lower house are from the same party, so they tend to agree. So once something gets to the committee and gets to the diet, it's very likely to pass. So what that means is that politics in the US and Japan is actually quite different in the following sense. In the US, a lot of the politics, the battles, the conflicts happen after legislation gets to the Congress. There's battles in the committee, there's battles on the floor, there's battles between the two houses. Whereas in Japan, a lot of the politics actually happens before the bill even gets to the diet. There's compromises made between different political leaders, between different ministries, and a big process of compromise and discussion. But once a bill gets to the diet, it tends to pass. Fourth, the US is a federal system, whereas Japan is a unitary system. So in the United States, we have 50 states. In Japan, you have prefectures. But states are different from prefectures in that they are more autonomous. They have a wider range of things that are decided at the state level, as opposed to in Japan, a wider range of things are decided at the national level. So to be specific, take education, right? Education system in the United States is much more variable across states and across cities than it is in Japan, right? There might be a bureaucrat in the Japanese central government who would roughly know what's being studied throughout Japan. But in the United States, that would be completely different. Or to give you another example, the bar exam, which is the test that allows you to become a lawyer, is different for each state. The drinking age, the age at which you can drink alcohol, may even be different across states. So there's much more autonomy or independence for the American states versus the Japanese prefectures. Fifth, the party system. So the US has a two-party system, whereas Japan has a multi-party system, right? So in the United States, we have the Republicans and the Democrats. In Japan, you have the Liberal Democratic Party, and then you have a range of other opposition parties. And the nature of the party system is also different in the sense that the American system is much more polarized. The two parties are very different. Whereas in Japan, the parties, particularly the Liberal Democratic Party and the major opposition parties, the differences are smaller than they are in the United States. So if you think about the Republicans versus the Democrats in the United States, Republicans tend to want lower taxes and lower government spending. The Democrats want higher government spending, and so they're willing to pay more in terms of taxes. The Democrats also tend to favor higher welfare spending, higher health care spending, whereas the Republicans want more limited government. On regulation, the Democrats tend to want more health, safety, and environmental regulation, whereas the Republicans want less. Two of the most controversial topics in the United States are gun control and abortion. On gun control, the Republicans tend to want less regulation of guns, whereas the Democrats want tougher regulations on guns. On abortion, the Republicans tend to be pro-life, and the Democrats tend to be pro-choice. What that means is that the Republicans want to abolish or prohibit abortions, whereas the Democrats want to keep them legal. Finally, on military issues, the differences are maybe not as great, but the Republicans tend to lead the side of more hawkish, in other words, wanting a stronger defense, whereas the Democrats are considered to be more dovish. And the differences between the parties are actually quite extreme. If you think about the average voter being in the middle, and we think of the Democrats on the left and the Republicans on the right, the Republican voters are less far to the right than the Republican Congress people. And the Democratic Congress representatives are further to the left than the Democratic voters. So you have a real polarization of the two parties. So which political system is better? Which one is worse? Well, as you might suspect, I can't really tell you, but I can say that each system has its own strengths and weaknesses, and they have very different problems. So on that note, let me finish with two comments. First, how about this polarization? In the U.S., you have this hyperpolarization. In Japan, you actually have what I would call less or non-polarization. What I mean by that is it's hard to tell the difference between, let's say, the liberal Democratic Party and the Democratic Party on a lot of policy issues. So in the U.S., the differences are exaggerated. In Japan, the differences are harder to see. Both, I would argue, are problematic. Polarization is problematic because it makes it very hard for the two sides to compromise and to really get things done. But non-polarization is a problem as well because that means that Japanese voters have a hard time figuring out what's the real policy difference between these parties. And so they don't get the clear choice that you have in the United States. Second comment I would make is that both systems are prone to gridlock. They can get stuck, but they get stuck for very different reasons. In the U.S., they get stuck because the system of checks and balances actually makes it hard to get things done. Because let's say that Congress starts to pass a bill, well, that can be challenged by the executive branch or it can be challenged in the courts. So it can be very hard to make big progress because of this very system of checks and balances was inherently designed to make it difficult. And also, the divided government that I was talking about a minute ago also makes it very hard to get things done because the two sides sometimes will not compromise. They might oppose each other just for the sake of opposing each other. I mean, in the case of the Obama administration, the Republicans opposed most of the things that Obama wanted to do. In the Trump administration, the Democrats opposed most of the things that Trump wants to do. So American politics can get stuck. But Japanese politics can get stuck too, but for very different reasons, which is that it's what I would call a consensual political system. That means that the parties try to compromise with each other. The ministries try to compromise with each other. The politicians try to compromise with the ministries. The ministries try to orchestrate bargains among various different interest groups. But that process of trying to forge compromise can be really slow and it can make it hard to get things done. So in the Japanese case, that whole process takes place before legislation gets to the diet. Once it gets to the diet, it tends to go smoothly and implementation is also smooth. So both systems have their problems and I hope that you will be part of the process of fixing them. Thanks very much and I hope that was a helpful introduction.