Prime ministerial leadership in Japan and the UK: sources of power and influence

The context for this project is a timely one. Traditionally, and in the simplest of terms, the UK prime minister has been characterized as relatively strong and the Japanese prime minister as relatively weak. However, we are currently faced with the opposite situation. Since 2010, the UK has experienced political turbulence in the form of coalition governments, the fallout from the Brexit referendum, and regular speculation over the future of current incumbent, Prime Minister Theresa May. In contrast, since 2012 Japan has moved away from the 'revolving door' of prime ministers that characterized Japanese politics between 2006 and 2012 and instead has experienced political stability under the leadership of Abe Shinzo. Despite ongoing political scandal and societal concerns over some of his more nationalist policies, Abe's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has secured a string of landslide elections since 2012. Abe himself recently secured his re-election as LDP leader, and de facto prime minister, until 2021 by which time he will become Japan's longest serving prime minister. The reversal in fortunes between the two countries could not be more stark.

This project aims to address questions surrounding prime ministerial leadership in these two leading parliamentary systems, the UK and Japan, that have often been overlooked in the comparative literature. Concretely, it aims to explore the changing nature and role of UK and Japanese prime ministers since the turn of the millennium as each country has faced the challenges of the global financial crisis, domestic political and economic problems, and rising traditional and non-traditional security threats.

This is a relevant comparison as Japan and the UK share similar goals, as the UK-Japan Joint Vision statement set out during May's visit to Tokyo in August 2017: "Japan and the UK are global strategic partners, sharing common interests as outward-looking and free-trading island nations with a global reach, committed to the rules-based international system. We share the fundamental values of freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law".

There has also been considerable interest at practitioner level to better understand each other's political systems given the similarities in parliamentary and party structures and processes. For example, the Tokyo Foundation for Policy Research 2008 Symposium and the Chatham House UK-Japan Global Seminar Series. However, the academic literature has yet to get to grips with many of these issues, and Japan is often omitted in studies of Westminster/Westminster-style systems. The project therefore addresses the lack of detailed, systematic comparative studies of leadership in the UK and Japan.

Our impact goals and audiences are as follows:
To enhance the understanding of not only academic but also practitioner (i.e. politicians) and policymaking communities in the UK and Japan of the changing position and power of both countries' prime ministers.
To enhance the understanding of prime ministerial performance within the UK and Japanese publics through collaboration with leading media organisations, in addition to the understandings of academic, practitioner and policymaking user groups.

The activities outlined in the Case for Support will provide pathways to generation of the impact. In the case of the impact on the understanding of the academic community this will first and foremost be through the creation of the network of established UK and Japanese scholars and early career researchers (ECRs). The events outlined in the Case for Support will drive the production of the outputs upon which the resulting impact within the academic, practitioner and policymaking communities will be based, namely special issues in leading Area Studies or Political Science journals. The additional pathway to this impact will be through engagement with a number of think tanks and other organizations that bring together academic, diplomatic and policymaking communities, namely Chatham House, the UK and Japanese Embassies, the British-Japanese Parliamentary Group and the UK-Japan 21st Century Group. These groups will have input into the research outputs as they develop by physical or online participation in each mini-team's activities in both London and Tokyo, in addition to the final international conference in Leeds. To take the example of the latter grouping, the UK-Japan 21st Century Group meets annually and its 'primary goal is to serve as a catalyst for increasing the level of mutual understanding and awareness of the political, economic, and social environments in each country'. It produces an annual report that is presented to the prime ministers of each country. We already have strong links to this group through past participants, Emeritus Professor Glenn Hook of the School of East Asian Studies at the University of Sheffield and Sir David Warren, former UK Ambassador to Japan from 2008 to 2012 and Visiting Professor at the University of Sheffield. We will seek to work with these groups to produce briefing papers to be presented at the seminars held in Tokyo and London and fed into their own schedule of discussions; for example, the London seminar will be held either at Chatham House, where many of the investigators have spoken previously, or at Westminster and facilitated by Flinders who hold a three-year professorial fellowship in the House of Commons.

As regards impacting upon public understanding of prime ministerial performance in the UK and Japan, this will be generated through engagement with specific journalists in both countries. For example, Richard Lloyd Parry is the Asia Editor of The Times (readership: 500,000) and was the `What the Papers Say' foreign correspondent of the year in 2005. Shimamura Wataru is a leading foreign correspondent of the Asahi Shinbun (readership: 11 million) having served in London, Beijing and Washington. Close working relationships with both journalists in shaping the reportage of these newspapers already exist as a result of Dobson's REF2014 Impact Case Study, Promoting Understanding of Japan's Role in Global Summitry.

Our Japanese project partners - the University of Tokyo, International University of Japan and Seikei University (see letters of support) - will widen our network of influence still further in academic, policymaking and journalist communities within Japan.

A dedicated website/online resource/social media presence on political leadership in both countries, created, maintained and monitored for impact by ECRs, will underpin all the dissemination of outputs and impact generation outlined above.