Are Japanese bureaucrats politically stronger than farmers?: The political economy of Japan's rice set-aside program

in the case of fallowing, weeding is a laborious job on a hot and humid sunny day.
Under rice cultivation, irrigated water covering paddies can prevent weeds. Furthermore,
part-time farmers are accustomed to growing rice. It is easy for them to continue
growing rice with routinely practiced, less laborious and low risk methods. Although
they have sufficient income from off-farm earnings, income from growing rice is fairly
attractive extra-revenue, mainly because it is not laborious. By contrast, for full-time
professional farmers, the burden of conversion from rice to other crops is relatively
lighter, although they also feel reluctance to set up new crops. The reason is that they
can start such a relatively large amount of acreage with adequate labor power that
returns on new investments are meaningful. Consequently, the grievances of part-time
farmers relating to set-aside programs tend to be larger than those of full-time farmers.

Furthermore, the grievances of part-time farmers tend to be more overtly voiced
from a political viewpoint. In Japanese rural society, part-time farmers are the majority,
while full-time professional farmers are the minority. Since the decision making in
agricultural cooperatives follows the one-member one-vote principle, the majority of
rural society, that is, part-time farmers, can control the political orientation of
agricultural cooperatives. Politicians also advocate the opinions of part-time farmers
rather than those of full-time farmers because they are the majority of voters. Thus,
part-time farmers are expected to be more politically influential than full-time farmers.
It is reasonable to suppose that in a region where the share of part-time farmers is larger,
the degree of grievances of farmers and political pressure of the region as a whole is
stronger.

Model

In order to verify the validity of the hypotheses, a model and a multiple-regression were
constructed as follows:

Hypothesis 1 was tested using a model consisting of the two explanatory variables

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