ABSTRACT
Japanese politics from the 1990s on has been marked by the prominence of the issue of administrative reform (gyōsei kaikaku or gyōkaku) on the policy agenda. Coinciding with the advent of the era of coalition governments that began with the historical alternation in power of 1993 and with the rapidly deteriorating state of public finance following the burst of the bubble economy, countless cases of bureaucratic corruption, incompetence, and maladministration came to the surface and unleashed an unprecedented public distrust of the administrative elite. Party competition intensified as new parties were formed and old ones struggled to adapt (or merely to survive) in a fluid political context that followed after the collapse of the 1955 system. Administrative reform, combined with a good deal of bureaucrat-bashing, became everyone’s fixation to the extent that the Lower House elections of 1996 were dubbed gyōkaku elections. No selfrespecting party could do without having its own proposals for the reform of the state.
