Data for this study are forthcoming.

In this paper we provide evidence from Japan that bears on a general theory of agenda power in legislatures. By agenda power we mean the power to determine (a) which bills are considered in the plenary session of the legislature, and (b) restrictions on debate and amendment for these bills, when they are considered. While a substantial amount of work has focused on the second category of agenda power, including studies of special rules in the U.S. House (e.g., Sinclair forthcoming), closure in the U.K. House of Commons (e.g., Cox 1987; Dion 1997), and the guillotine in the French National Assembly (e.g., Huber 1996), there is very little on the first and arguably more fundamental sort of agenda power. This agenda power—the power to decide which bills will actually be considered on the floor of the legislature—is our focus here, and henceforth when we refer to ‘agenda power’ we shall mean this narrower conception.

In most parliamentary systems, most observers take for granted that the government “controls the agenda.” That it generally does so—indeed, that it monopolizes the agenda—is argued explicitly by Döring (1995). Yet, there are exceptions to the government’s agenda power even in parliamentary systems. In Denmark in the 1970s, for example, the government clearly lost control of the agenda on social issues, retaining control only over foreign and budgetary issues (Damgaard and Svenson 1989).

Here, we are particularly interested in factors that might limit the government’s agenda power. Two institutional features of legislatures that can potentially lessen the ability of a government to get its way are bicameralism (Tsebelis and Money 1997) and a strong committee system (Strom 1990). An upper house can hinder the government’s ability to push through its legislative programme if, for example, (1) it lacks a majority in the upper house or its majority is small; and (2) the upper house can block or delay legislation. A strong committee system can block or slow a government’s legislative progress if, for example, the opposition chairs some of these committees and chairs have significant agenda powers.

Japan has both an upper house which has sometimes been under opposition control and a committee system in which the opposition sometimes secures chairs. We ask whether these features have allowed the opposition systematically to affect the government’s agenda. We look in particular at two questions: (1) How large is the government’s agenda (i.e., how many bills does it seek to push through to enactment), as a function of opposition institutional power (control of upper house and lower house committee chairs)? (2) How controversial is the government’s agenda—i.e., how many bills do opposition parties oppose—again as a function of opposition institutional power?

Our results, based on analyses of the period 1977-96, show that the controversialness of the government’s agenda in Japan declines when the opposition controls more lower-house committee chairs. Controversialness also declines—substantially—when the opposition holds a majority in the upper house. However, the size of the government’s agenda, at least by our crude measure, is unaffected by changes in these two institutional features.

Our results provide the first systematic evidence that lower-house chairs do affect policy outcomes in Japan. They also demonstrate that even Japan’s relatively weak upper house is still powerful enough to extract significant concessions from the government. More broadly, our work is among the first to measure systematically the extent to which government agenda-setting is constrained by the opposition’s institutional “veto” powers (cf. Tsebelis 1995).

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