Welfare and Capitalism in Postwar Japan
Party, Bureaucracy, and Business

Estevez-Abe explores the egalitarian capitalism of postwar Japan and the political mechanisms that sustained it.

Margarita Estevez-Abe (Author)

9780521722216, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 21 July 2008

360 pages, 16 b/w illus. 17 tables
23.4 x 15.6 x 1.9 cm, 0.51 kg

“An amazing book. It offers an original characterization of the political economy of the Japanese welfare state, a detailed thematic story of social policy decision making over decades, and an audacious proposition that electoral systems explain (almost) everything. I have some quibbles with all three arguments and I certainly hope the prediction that the Japanese welfare state will soon look like the British welfare state will not come true, but I know that Japanologists and comparativists with any interest in social policy, economics, and politics will have to take this formidable book into account.”
-John Campbell, University of Michigan

This book explains how postwar Japan managed to achieve a highly egalitarian form of capitalism despite meager social spending. Estevez-Abe develops an institutional, rational-choice model to solve this puzzle. She shows how Japan's electoral system generated incentives that led political actors to protect various groups that lost out in market competition. She explains how Japan's postwar welfare state relied upon various alternatives to orthodox social spending programs. The initial postwar success of Japan's political economy has given way to periods of crisis and reform. This book follows this story up to the present day. Estevez-Abe shows how the current electoral system renders obsolete the old form of social protection. She argues that institutionally Japan now resembles Britain and predicts that Japan's welfare system will also come to resemble Britain's. Japan thus faces a more market-oriented society and less equality.

1. Rashomon: the Japanese welfare state in a comparative perspective
2. Structural logics of welfare politics
3. Historical patterns of structural logic in postwar Japan
4. The rise of the Japanese social protection system in the 1950s
5. Economic growth and Japan's selective welfare expansion
6. Institutional complemetarities and the Japanese welfare capitalism
7. The emergence of trouble in the 1970s
n8. Policy shifts in the 1990s: the emergence of European-style welfare politics
9. The end of Japan's social protection as we know it: becoming like Britain?

Subject Areas: Political economy [KCP], Comparative politics [JPB], Asian history [HBJF]