Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines the role of governing parties in Japan’s foreign and security policymaking by focusing on the formulation of the National Security Strategy (NSS) under the Abe and Kishida administrations.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the role of governing parties in Japan’s foreign and security policymaking by focusing on the formulation of the National Security Strategy (NSS) under the Abe and Kishida administrations. Existing scholarship often portrays Japan’s security policy as an executive-dominated domain, emphasizing the centralization of authority in the Prime Minister’s Office and the expansion of prime ministerial leadership. While this literature captures significant institutional developments, it tends to understate the continued involvement of governing parties in shaping high-stakes strategic decisions.

To address this gap, the paper integrates insights from Principal–Agent (PA) theory and the Party Government perspective. PA theory conceptualizes governing parties as collective principals tasked with monitoring and constraining executive agents, but it also highlights the structural limits of such control in policy areas characterized by high information asymmetry and executive discretion. The Party Government approach, by contrast, emphasizes the organizational functions of governing parties in coordinating internal preferences, absorbing conflict, and providing political justification for government decisions. Rather than treating these approaches as competing explanations, this study advances a dual-function framework in which governing parties perform both control-oriented and coordination-oriented roles, with the relative balance between these functions varying according to prime ministerial leadership conditions.

Empirically, the paper conducts a comparative, process-oriented analysis of the NSS under the Abe and Kishida administrations. Drawing on official policy documents, party-level deliberations, and contemporaneous media reports, it traces governing party involvement across different stages of the policy process. The analysis suggests that under the Abe administration’s strong, centralized leadership, governing parties primarily served as mechanisms for absorbing conflict and legitimation, helping to internalize dissent and transform potentially contentious security reforms into party-backed policies. Under the Kishida administration, by contrast, governing party organizations played a more visible role as arenas of coordination and balancing, reflecting more constrained leadership conditions and heightened intra-party and coalition considerations.

As a preliminary study, the findings aim to establish the plausibility of this dual-function framework and lay the groundwork for future research on party–executive relations in foreign and security policy across parliamentary systems.