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

This proposed panel considers how frontline officials in Japanese public services are attempting to address common governance issues in advanced democracies, such as rapid aging, inequality, immigration, gender, civic education, and transnational public policy challenges in an era of democratic backsliding. Japan’s unique bureaucratic structure, known for strong interpersonal administrative capacity, plays a crucial role in responding to these shared concerns.
Growing societal polarization over future political and social goals destabilizes both political and policy environments. Frontline officials—those who implement policy programs daily—are most affected by this uncertainty and may even influence it. How do these officials overcome challenges in their fields amidst resource constraints, diverse norms, and rules shaped by the democratic context? By addressing this question, we explore strategies for resisting polarization from the bottom—from the intersection of the state and the street.
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.
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.
The effective management of frontline personnel is essential for sustaining organizational performance. 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, are considered to have relatively small gender disparities.
Arami examines how open office layout and job embeddedness influence women’s concentration in frontline roles and underrepresentation in management, using survey data and regression analysis across four municipalities.
Together, the papers shed light on frontline strategies for navigating constraints in democratic governance.