Introduction: Policy Legitimacy, Unpopular Legislation and the Limits of Self-Interest

Abstract

Why do politicians sometimes make unpopular or contested policies that could damage their electoral prospects? This is the question this book seeks to answer. Self-interest permeates current academic and journalistic depictions of politicians’ behaviour. But politicians still sometimes make decisions and policies that do not sit comfortably with such depictions of them as self-interested rational goal seekers. One cannot deny the profound influence of self-interest in politics. But there is the possibility that explanations made solely from this standpoint do not accurately reconstruct political behaviour and may even hinder the realization of the potential for efficacious democratic policy making. This book is a study of loss-imposing policy making. It probes the above question by examining the case of Japan, but is meant to be a first step toward understanding loss-imposing policy making in liberal democracies as well as in other polities.