The ideological conflicts of Japan's subnational politics have tended to be interpreted as either being largely muted or contained within national dimensions. Following two decades of substantial decentralization and growing local autonomy, however, a diversity of new ideological responses to local issues have appeared. These include neo-liberal parties and executives in wealthier regions such as Tokyo and Osaka or a rising regionalist identity politics such as that found in Okinawa. Nativist right and populist left along with single-issue parties are also now fielding candidates for subnational elections. Despite this increasingly crowded field, there is still no systematic understanding of the divergent ideological worldviews and dimensions of conflict operating at the subnational level. Nor do we know how these worldviews “deviate” from the traditional “norm” of a progressive vs. conservative conflict dimension assumed to characterize Japanese subnational politics. This paper begins to fill this gap by investigating the campaign discourse of gubernatorial candidates both before and after the pandemic outbreak. We find that the language, and underlying ideological orientation, of these candidates can be separated into four clusters: “mainstream”, “old left”, “neo-liberal”, and “fringe”. In addition, “regionalist” and “new left” populism can also be identified in select elections.

New Zealand moved further in neo-liberal tax reform than most other advanced economies over the last three decades. The article investigates this extreme case to address the question of what explains major neo-liberal economic reform. Comparing tax policy-making in two periods, the 1980s and 2008–10, we argue that neo-liberal tax reform in New Zealand is best understood as the product of “autonomous bureaucratic action”. That is, bureaucratic organisations within the state independently formulated the goals and ideas for reform, took an activist role in policy-making and strongly influenced the policy preferences of ministers. Moreover, responding to a criticism often raised against state-centred theories, we offer an explicit explanation of bureaucratic preferences. We argue that bureaucratic goals and ideas were a product of how particular structural features of the bureaucracy – organisation and training – made ministries more or less receptive to new ideas within the economics discipline.

Food in its many manifestations allows us to explore the global control of health and to examine the ways in which food choice is moulded by many interests. The global food market is controlled by a small number of companies who operate a system that delivers ‘cheap’ food to the countries of the developed world. This ‘cheap’ food comes at a price, which externalises costs to the nation state in terms of health consequences (diabetes, coronary heart disease and other food-related diseases) and to the environment in terms of pollution and the associated clean-up strategies. Food policy has not to any great extent dealt with these issues, opting instead for an approach based on nutrition, food choice and biomedical health. Ignoring wider elements of the food system including issues of ecology and sustainability constrains a broader understanding within public health nutrition. Here we argue that public health nutrition, through the medium of health promotion, needs to address these wider issues of who controls the food supply, and thus the influences on the food chain and the food choices of the individual and communities. Such an upstream approach to food policy (one that has been learned from work on tobacco) is necessary if we are seriously to influence food choice.