Environmental policy in the United States and Japan

While principal agent models (PAM) and the theory of legislative dominance offer several interesting insights into bureaucratic politics, both hypotheses amount to oversimplifications that are incapable of accurately describing environmental policy in the United States or Japan, or explaining why some agencies are more resistant to political control than others. For example, PAM would predict that agencies in Japan would tend to be far more autonomous than their counterparts in the United States due to large information asymmetries created by important institutional differences (Separated System vs. Parliamentary System, Active Judiciary vs. Passive, Individualism vs. the Group, etc.) between the two governments. On the other hand, proponents of the theory of legislative dominance find that elected principals generally control most agencies. However, an examination of the major land use and natural resources policy bureaucracies (their size, outputs, major principals and policy responsibilities) in the United States and Japan shows that both theories overstate their findings in addition to revealing three distinct patterns. First, what an agency does matters. Agencies that are devoted to resource extraction tend to be bigger, more independent, and resistant to political control than other environmental agencies. Second, the organization of an agency is also important. Large, diffuse agencies with a number of subsidiary bureaus are difficult to monitor let alone control while smaller and more centralized ones are easier to control because clearer lines of authority exist. Third, because the mission of an environmental agency can have significant economic consequences, extractive agencies are resistant to attempts to change their mission because they represent a steady supply of pork for rural communities and politicians. Consequently, the ideas that most agencies are powerful, that legislatures control the bureaucracy, and that an agency in Japan must be stronger than one in America are false in the context of environmental policy.