| Popis: |
This article, which describes certain outstanding features of the informal politics of economic development at the "rice roots" in contemporary Japan, is descriptive rather than theoretical. Its data are drawn mainly from a series of personal interviews with local politicians and aides to members of Parliament (MPs) conducted in two Japanese prefectures, Okayama and Toyama, in the summer of 1994. Due to the small number of cases included, the study reported in this article does not lend itself easily to broad generalizations about the very large topic suggested by the title. The rich empirical details of each case examined, however, are highly suggestive of certain salient features of that topic. Such details reveal in particular the remarkably well established and stable patterns of rice root-level interest articulation and aggregation in contemporary Japan, and should be very helpful in future efforts at empirically driven conceptualization and theory-building in a new and largely uncharted field of comparative political analysis. |
