Divided Parliaments and Lawmaking: Japan’s Twisted Diet

Abstract

David Mayhew (1991) famously argued that divided government does not grind U.S. policy making to a halt, or even reduce the flow of important legislation. Partisan rivals find ways to strike deals. In parliamentary systems, the stakes are thought to be higher, because government survival is partly a function of legislative effectiveness. If a parliamentary system is strongly bicameral, a government could face an opposition majority in the upper house. Even if the upper house cannot technically fire the government, it might have the means and motivation to block the government’s legislative agenda and cause it to resign. In this paper, we examine the case of the Japanese Diet, which has followed 34 years of single-party bicameral majorities with 23 years of coalition governments and frequently divided parliaments. Japanese pundits and practitioners bemoan the advent of 'Twisted Diets,' as one house rejects what the other approves, leaving the government back where it started. Is this image correct? Has divided government paralyzed Japanese lawmaking? We show that governments facing Twisted Diets propose significantly fewer bills and see more amended or rejected, and that the mix of policy output changes as the opposition gets stronger and depending on whether the government makes deals with them or tries to avoid doing so.

Keywords: bicameralism, twisted diet, Japan, lawmaking