Japan and the United States face many similar challenges of governance. Japan in particular is confronted with a serious crisis of governance with profound implications for its ability to deal with the decade-long economic stagnation and the deteriorating public trust in political processes. This book explores the evolving patterns of governance in the two countries as they grapple with the changes wrought by the forces of globalization. Focusing on the volatile period of Japanese politics since the burst of the bubble economy in the early 1990s, the book features chapters on Japanese public opinion, elections, political finance, party politics, policymaking, institutional reform, and the role of the private sector in public affairs. Five Japanese scholars and practitioners write about the efforts under way in Japan to restructure its electoral and governing processes and to cope with its major policy challenges, and five American policy experts respond with insights from American experience.

Contributors include Kato Hideki (Japan Initiative), Shiozaki Yasuhisa, (Japanese House of Representatives), Taniguchi Masaki, (University of Tokyo, Japan), Yoshida Shin'ichi, (Asahi Shimbun and University of Tokyo, Japan), and E. J. Dionne Jr., Paul C. Light, James M. Lindsay, and R. Kent Weaver (Brookings Institution).