ABSTRACT

The Japanese government has not only created strategies to smooth the siting of nuclear power plants and other large-scale facilities, but has upgraded and refined these tools as it has learned from its experiences. These results support previous work which found that bureaucratic and political leaders in democracies are extremely resistant to being swayed by public opinion and, instead, find confluence with public opinion by employing various measures to influence it. The Japanese government simultaneously delegates authority for bargaining to private utilities while intensively utilizing a variety of policy tools to structure citizen preferences before any actual citizen-utility bargaining over sites.