Japan is an excellent case for the comparative study of the connections between democracy and culture.

—It is a country with a well established system of constitutional democracy with roots in the nineteenth century. Politically, the country has been constitutionally and electorally democratic for the entire period since the end of World War II.

—Democracy in Japan also has strong social and cultural underpinnings. Despite a hierarchical Confucian tradition, the country is largely egalitarian in its educational, economic, and informational systems. The Japanese citizen enjoys a democratic day-to-day existence.

—Because Japan's democracy, like that of all countries, is far from perfect, it is a good case study for examining ideal conceptions of democracy in contrast to practical democratic realities.

Japan, the non-Western world's first country to introduce and continue a parliamentary system of government, and one of the most stable democracies in the industrialized world today, provides an excellent case for the study of political parties and representation.

—It was the first non-Western country to introduce a parliament in 1890 and mass male suffrage in 1925.

—Political parties and popular elections were an important basis for governance in the period prior to World War II, and have been the sole basis for the selection of Japan's governments since then, making Japan one of the few non-Western examples of electoral representation.

—Japan today, despite free elections and a competitive multiparty system, has had an unbroken string of governments formed exclusively by the conservative Liberal Democratic Party since that party's formation in 1955, making Japan the best example of uninterrupted conservative rule among the advanced industrialized democracies.

—There are enough similarities and differences in Japan's electoral and party systems to make it an informative, but not totally anomalous, comparative case study for those generally interested in these phenomena.

Shortly before his death in 1971 E. E. Schattschneider said, “I suppose the most important thing I have done in my field is that I have talked longer and harder and more persistently and enthusiastically about political parties than anyone else alive.” Schattschneider's claim is not boastful, but factual. Exactly fifty years ago he completed Party Government, a book that remains a “must” read for students of the U.S. party system. But Schattschneider did more than write books. As Chairman of the APSA-sanctioned Committee on Political Parties, he presided over a debate that resulted in the seminal report, Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System. Like Party Government, this also is a “must” read. Evron Kirkpatrick proclaimed it “a landmark in the history of political science as policy science” (1971). Clinton Rossiter said he would “recommend it … to all who are interested in moving toward stronger party government” (1960). Theodore J. Lowi ranked the Schattschneider committee report as “second only to the 1937 President's Committee on Administrative Management as a contribution by academics to public discourse on the fundamentals of American democracy” (1985). William Crotty believed it exercised “the most significant influence on the debate over the operation of political parties that occurred between the Progressive period and the party reform movement of the 1970s” (1980).

The responsible party model has had a long life in part because of the passionate arguments Schattschneider made on its behalf.

Japan, the first Asian country to enter the ranks of the industrialized democracies, provides an excellent case study of a non-Western, but highly modern, national bureaucracy. As such, it provides a useful, informative, but culturally different, country for comparative purposes, whether with the United States specifically or with other industrialized democracies more generally.

—Because of the central role that the Japanese bureaucracy has played in planning and implementing so many of the major changes in Japan, it is a good example of bureaucracy as planner and agent of change.

—Because the Japanese bureaucracy has been so closely linked to political leadership, it provides an important contrast to countries where bureaucrats and politicians are presumed to have rather separate and antagonistic roles.

—Because Japan has selfconsciously limited the size of its governmental bureaucracy, the Japanese case provides an excellent counter-case to presumptions that bureaucratic expansion is inevitable. Japan instead offers a most important case of systematic downscaling of bureaucracy.

—Because the Japanese bureaucracy has gone through several conscious historical reformulations, including explicit imitation of the Prussian model, and systematic reformulation by American bureaucrats, it is an excellent case for examining the interaction of competing bureaucratic traditions.

Why should one study elite recruitment and political leadership in Japan? Because, our answer would go, we live in a world of ever deepening interdependence among nations where the peace, security, and prosperity of each is greatly influenced by policies and actions of another. This is particularly true when the latter is an economic superpower like Japan, the largest creditor nation and aid donor in the world of the early 1990s with a gross national product equal to about fifteen per cent of the world's total. Who makes Japanese domestic and foreign policies and how they are made has important implications for the welfare of other nations, including the United States, which maintains what a former American ambassador to Japan, Mike Mansfield, called the “most important bilateral relationship” in the world.

“Elite” and “leadership” are two concepts that help us identify and analyze those who play central roles in a nation's policymaking process. Commonplace as they are in the vocabulary of both modern political science and the mass media, these words are often used ambiguously and interchangeably. They are, however, etymologically distinctive words that can serve us as useful analytical tools only if they are clearly and distinctively defined. In the discussion that follows, we use “elite” to refer to a group of individuals who hold privileged positions in society or organizations and “leadership” to refer to the exercise of power, broadly defined, to lead others in collective action. As William Welsh has suggested, elites are thus “set apart from the rest of society by their preeminence in political and governmental hierarchies,” while leadership means “ability to mobilize human resources in pursuit of specific goals.”

On October 15, 1991, the United States Senate approved the appointment of Judge Clarence Thomas to the United States Supreme Court by a vote of 52 to 48. The presidents's selection of Judge Thomas to replace Thurgood Marshall as the Court's lone African-American justice and the hearings that preceded the Senate's confirmation of his appointment initially engendered questions about his qualifications to serve on the Supreme Court and his conservative political positions. Later, queries arising from accusations of sexual harassment took center stage. In fact, in the weeks immediately preceding his confirmation attention turned almost entirely from his judicial qualifications and his political positions to allegations of sexual harassment.

Thomas's confirmation is a story of racial politics enmeshed with gender politics and the conservative social agenda of the Reagan-Bush administrations. It is important to understand this process if one is to fathom some of the events that followed in the wake of this judicial appointment.

This is the 50th anniversary of E. E. Schattschneider's Party Government, that eloquent and influential manifesto, first published in 1942, celebrating party government and popular rule. It is also an occasion to recall one of the pioneers in the profession, and to reflect on his contributions to the development of political science as an intellectual discipline. I have been asked to comment, albeit briefly, on Schattschneider's public philosophy, and, less grandly, on his notion of citizenship and citizen education—a daunting task, at best. I say this because Schattschneider's views are widely known and widely cited, as even a cursory glance at entries in recent editions of the Social Science Citation Index reveals. And he writes in a style that is eloquent and accessible, and leaves little doubt in the reader's mind about where he stands on issues. As a result, any commentary on his views runs the risk of either stating what everyone already knows, or, worse yet, mis-stating it.