How Policies Change: The Japanese Government and the Aging Society.

This ambitious book seeks to make sense out of virtually all changes in Japanese policies toward the elderly--from pensions to health care to recreation to employment--in the period from 1950 through the 1980s. In addition to the usual reliance on government documents, media stories, and academic articles, the author's account is based heavily upon 237 relatively structured interviews (including approximately 100 national government officials, 50 local government officials, 40 experts, and 24 interest group leaders). This impressive work of scholarship has three intended audiences.

Although not focusing on cross-national comparisons, the book should be of interest to scholars and practitioners concerned with the development of the welfare state in OECD countries--particularly since much of that literature neglects Japan. Because of the country's preoccupation with post-war reconstruction and its domination by the pro-business Liberal Party, japanese pension programs lagged behind those in many Western countries and tended to be administered by numerous organizations. The health care system has also been quite fragmented, but coverage became universal in 1959 and is widely regarded as among the most successful in the world. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the elderly in Japan is that about 60% live with their children, compared to about 20% in most Western countries; this produces substantial attention to policies regarding families with dependent elderly but relatively little attention to housing.

This book should likewise be of interst to the growing number of scholars and practitioners interested in Japanese politics. Among the more interesting features revealed by Campbell's study are the very prominent role played by national bureaucracies, compared to the relatively modest importance of national political parties and interest groups, in explaining policy reforms in a wide variety of areas in the 1960s and 1970s.

The third intended audience--and the one of greatest interest to me--consists of scholars interested in developing a theory of policy change. Campbell doesn't really develop a theory per se. Instead, in Chapter 2, he presents several ideas. First, he argues that the process of policy change is primarily a function of the energy of participants and ideas about social problem solving. This produces four "modes" of policy change: (a) "cognitive" policy processes (low energy, high ideas) dominated by the search for rational solutions to social problems; (b) "political" decision-making, in which both ideas and energy are important; (c) "artifactual" policy change, in which high levels of diffuse energy get translated into a particular policy proposal (idea) through a chance opportunity; and (d) "inertial" policy change, characterized by low energy and low ideas inw hich perturbations from the outside world are routinely processed into policy changes. Campbell also emphasizes the importance of "policy sponsorship," i.e. an individual or organization who has developed some persuasive ideas about the nature of the problem and how it should be solved and then mobilizes the energy necessary to overcome resistance. His dominant metaphor is that policy is like a billiard ball which will continue to move in the same direction until someone develops an idea that it should shift direction and then mobilizes the energy necessary to accomplish it (p. 51). These ideas are then used to help interpret events in each of the case study chapters dealing with pensions, health care, etc.

The principal strength of Campbell's analysis is that he views policy ideas as a critical variable, i.e. he doesn't assume that policy change is simply a function of the distribution of political resources. Ideas are particularly important in the cognitive and political modes, although much less so in the artifactual and inertial modes. A second strength is that, in the concluding chapter, he uses each of the four modes as a "lens" through which to view events of the last 40 years (a la Graham Allison). A third appealing feature is that each of the modes can be related to a literature on policy change: the congnitive mode is the preferred explaination of bureaucrats and policy analysts; the political mode focuses on the ideological and political conflicts normally emphasized by political scientists; the inertial mode views changes in the socio-economic environment as the critical factor affecting public policy; and the artifactual mode relies upon the "garbage can" theory of Cohen and March.

Despite these appealing features, Campbell's "proto-theory" suffers from several serious limitations. First, it never really integrates the four modes by, for example, specifying the conditions under which each will predominate. Instead, a particular policy innovation is assigned to one of the four boxes with no systematic effort to explain why one mode rather than another happened to predominate in that situation. Second, the author never attempts to develop a causal theory of policy change in terms of a set of interrelated propositions which give rise to a number of testable hypotheses. Instead, he simply seeks to "help make sense out of" situations in a purely post hoc fasion (p. 353). In contrast to Campbell, I think that an integrated theory of policy change is possible. But that requires the theorist to be clear enough and ambitious enough to make predictions susceptable of being disconfirmed by the evidence. A third limitation is that one of the author's critical concepts--"energy"--suffers from ambiguities and inconsistencies. At times it means power or policital resources, while elsewhere it refers to free-flowing energy (such as a time of social ferment) (pp. 50-51). At times it includes goal-directed behabior (p.30), while at othe times there is no goal (p.32). And at times goals fall under the rubric of "ideas" (pp. 49-50).

In the final alanysis, Campbell ahs written an impressive, but fairly traditional, case study. The scope is ambitious: virtually all Japanese policies toward the elderly over the past 40 years. This book will be of use to people concerned with Japan and probably to those interested in comparative welfare policy. But the author's unwillingness and/or inability to articulate a coherent, falsifiable theory of policy change means that it will have only limited appeal to the broader community of scholars interested in understanding the policy process across a wide spectrum of policy areas and/or countries.

Paul A. Sabatier
University of California, Davis