The purpose of this paper is to examine the political process of bureaucrats' seemingly discretionary allocations among prefectures in Japan's rice set-aside program. Some hypotheses and a model are proposed and then these are empirically tested. Two major findings of this study are as follows: Firstly, it is suggested that the bureaucrats' discretionary allocation tends to be revised in response to political pressure. Consequently, allocations among prefectures tend to be inversely proportionate to the degree of political pressures. Moreover, such pressures can be explained by the expected income from rice-production and the share of part-time farmers, who are the majority in Japanese rural society and politically powerful. Secondly, among various factors which are publicly announced as those used in the calculation of allocation, it is suggested that those which may naturally reflect the market mechanism remain influential even after revision. Similarly, the factors which are contrary to the market mechanism, such as the share of full-time professional farmers, become less influential.

摘要本文的目的在于检视日本稻米拨备计划中官僚在各县间看似自由裁量的拨款的政治过程。提出了一些假设和模型，并对其进行了实证检验。本研究的两个主要发现如下:第一，官僚的自由裁量权分配倾向于因应政治压力而修正。因此，各县之间的分配往往与政治压力的程度成反比。此外，这种压力可以用水稻生产的预期收入和兼职农民的比例来解释，兼职农民在日本农村社会中占多数，在政治上势力强大。其次，在各种公开公布的用于分配计算的因素中，建议那些自然反映市场机制的因素即使经过修订仍有影响。同样，与市场机制相反的因素，如专职职业农民的比例，也变得不那么有影响力。