Resistance to the Democratic Challenges from the Bottom: How do Frontline Officials in Japanese Public Services Overcome the Governance Issues

This panel considers how frontline officials in the Japanese public services are attempting to address the common contemporary governance issues in advanced democracies, such as rapid aging with low birth rates, inequality, immigration, gender, civic education, and various transnational public policy issues in an era of democratic backsliding. Japan’s unique bureaucratic structure, known for high performance in interpersonal administration, plays a crucial role in addressing these shared challenges.
Growing societal polarization over future political and social goals destabilizes both political and policy environments. Yet, frontline officials—those who implement policy programs on a day-to-day basis—are most affected by this uncertainty and may even influence it. How do these officials attempt to overcome challenges in their fields amidst resource constraints, diverse norms, and rules, influenced by the democratic context? By addressing this question, we provide strategies for resisting polarization from the bottom, that is, from the intersection of the state and the street.
Arami explores how geography mediates the traditional dilemma such as workload and experience of customer harassment which affect the factors hindering the motivation of frontline staff working at health centers during COVID-19 through the secondary analysis of survey conducted in 2022.
Inagaki analyses what structural factors affect how the front-line staff recognize the language and provide the language services, through interviews with the local government officials, as the multilingual support other than Japanese language has become increasingly necessary at the front line of local government, due to the increase in the number of foreign residents.
Maeda examines gender occupational segregation in Japan’s public sector using personnel data from municipal governments and reveals that significant imbalances in the allocation of policy areas, even in the public sector considered to have relatively small gender disparities.
Murakami focuses on how public-school teachers maintain their neutrality and impartiality when teaching politics and how to deal with politics in schools by examining the comparative historical background and elucidates two patterns of political neutrality among teachers, namely, activist neutrality and passive neutrality. In Japan, which is classified as the latter, schools and teachers may be harming civic education and democracy.