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Paper short abstract:

Contributing to studies on policy expertise, I employ the concept of “knowledge regime” to the case of Japan as developmental state. I focus on the role of policy experts and think tanks as “mobile carriers” in formulating Abe’s post-2012 “Abenomics” and Kishida’s 2021 “new form of capitalism”.

Paper long abstract:

To explain variations in policy outcomes, scholarship in comparative political economics has focused on the institutional composition within Anglo-American and Western European liberal, statist, and neocorporatist regimes. In a recent addition to this body of literature, new analyses focused on “knowledge regimes” as mechanisms by which ideas are being produced and transmitted within political regimes. In particular, the role of think tanks and policy experts as “mobile carriers” of ideas has gained attention. However, this literature has not taken into account the specific institutional arrangement of the (post-)developmental states with its governments playing a dominant role in policymaking. Therefore, in this paper I attempt to contribute to the literature exploring variation in policy outcome and the role of political expertise by adding the development state to the set of political regime types. I will do this by focusing on Japan as a classic representation of the developmental state.

Governments in Japan have become increasingly interested in policy-relevant ideas on how to revitalize the national economy. This focus has provided policy entrepreneurs in academia and beyond with new opportunities to promote new economic policy programs. In this paper, I focus on two programs, Abe Shinzo’s post-2012 “Abenomics” and Kishida Fumio’s “new form of capitalism” introduced in 2021. Specifically, I ask whether advisors outside the formal government and/or ruling party apparatus helped to provide the policy ideas that informed Japanese economic policy. I argue that a change in government has created a window of opportunity in Japan for policy entrepreneurs, including think tankers, to impact in ideational terms the development of a new signature economic policy in Japan. Moreover, I illustrate that think tanks in particular now play a more prominent role in Japanese economic policymaking. I argue that this is the result of institutional changes in Japan, especially since the collapse of the 2009 DPJ government which illustrated the need for alternative sources of policy ideas in addition to a dominant bureaucracy catering expertise to LDP governments. This being the case, I suggest that Japan’s marketplace for ideas has become more competitive.