Poverty, Equality and Growth

In contrast to the large indigent population in Japan in the 1950s, very few Japanese live in poverty in the 1990s. This text explains the Japanese government's decision to respond to poverty by promoting equality as the basis for a social compromise. Deborah Milly argues that to account for why and how political actors crafted a programme that won acceptance, we must look beyond them and identify how they relied on knowledge and normative arguments. This text straddles theoretical fault lines in comparative politics by exploring the interactions among choice, language, knowledge, and institutions in policy processes, and has implications for the ongoing debate between proponents of rational choice theory as a universal explanation for the decisions of political actors and those who focus on historically or culturally specific conditions.