Jason Lowther

What makes a directly elected mayor genuinely accountable to the public? How do contrasting political and administrative systems shape the conduct, choices, and leadership styles of those entrusted with substantial local authority? These questions were central to a recent seminar led by Akinari Takehisa, former mayor of Setouchi City in Japan, and as part of his PhD studies at Kwansei Gakuin University in Japan, visiting researcher at Nottingham Business School. Drawing on a rare combination of long mayoral experience and rigorous academic research, Aki offered a compelling comparative exploration of how accountability is constructed and enacted within Japan and the United Kingdom.

Aki’s work centres on executive mayors, leaders who uniquely embody both political and managerial authority. Unlike council leaders or ministers, who operate within more layered decision-making structures, executive mayors face the dual responsibility of providing political direction and ensuring the effective, lawful, and ethical delivery of public services. This dual role offers the promise of coherence and visibility in leadership, while simultaneously demanding a careful balance between responsiveness, organisational discipline, professional values, and legal boundaries.

Why Compare Japan and the UK?

Although Japan and the UK represent different political traditions, their local government systems share notable similarities. Both countries are advanced democracies with historically strong central oversight of municipal administration. Both have grappled with questions of local leadership and experimented with models aimed at enhancing the authority and public visibility of mayors.  Japan has adopted the directly elected mayor model across all of its 1,718 municipalities, embedding it deeply into local governance. The UK, by contrast, has applied the model selectively, introducing executive mayors in just 13 principal local authorities since 2002. This contrast creates a rich basis for comparison: one system fully institutionalised, the other still evolving.

But the most significant insights emerge from how each country structures accountability. Japan’s governance arrangements involve vertically layered responsibilities shared between national, prefectural and municipal governments. This can foster helpful coordination, but it can also confuse responsibility when things go wrong. The UK, meanwhile, relies heavily on arm’s-length accountability mechanisms, with statutory roles such as Section 151 Officers and Monitoring Officers acting as key guardians of financial integrity and legal compliance. These institutional safeguards create clearer boundaries around mayoral authority.

Three Core Questions

Aki’s research explores three interrelated questions. The first concerns how institutional environments in Japan and the UK shape mayoral accountability. The second looks at how personal characteristics (leadership styles, professional backgrounds, and the use of performance information) influence accountable behaviour. The third examines the behavioural traits that support or undermine accountability, identified through interviews and narrative analysis.

To address these questions, Aki conducted extensive fieldwork: interviews with 15 mayors and six key stakeholders in Japan, and with six mayors and six stakeholders in the UK. This qualitative evidence was supplemented with a literature review and advanced comparative techniques, including fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), which allows researchers to understand complex relationships across multiple cases.

What the Early Findings Reveal

A first major insight concerns the impact of institutional contexts. In Japan, accountability reforms have unfolded gradually since the 1990s, driven by incremental devolution and efforts to improve transparency. The use of performance information has grown, though its uptake varies significantly between municipalities. In the UK, accountability has evolved in more dramatic cycles. Reforms associated with New Public Management in the 1980s, followed by the Best Value regime in the late 1990s and 2000s, significantly expanded performance oversight before many national requirements were rolled back during the austerity era after 2010.

A second key finding arises from the fsQCA analysis. Mayors who demonstrated consistently high levels of political, hierarchical, professional and legal accountability were far more likely to sustain long and stable careers. By contrast, those whose professional or legal accountability was weak were more likely to experience short or troubled terms, particularly in Japan where mayors enjoy substantial personal discretion. Interestingly, extensive use of performance information did not necessarily correlate with stronger accountability. Its effectiveness depended on how thoughtfully and transparently it was applied.

Aki also found that behavioural characteristics play a decisive role. Inclusive leadership, transparency, ethical judgement, and constructive collaboration with professional officers strengthened accountability in both countries. Conversely, secrecy, impulsive or populist decision‑making, and blurred boundaries between political campaigning and administrative neutrality frequently undermined it. Japan and the UK each demonstrated examples of positive “synergies” between political and managerial roles, such as the ability to commit to long‑term policies or communicate strategy clearly to the public. But both also exhibited negative synergies when these roles clashed or overlapped in unhelpful ways.

Conclusions

Aki’s emerging conclusions highlight the importance of recognising accountability as a multidimensional and dynamic practice. Japan continues to advance its approach through gradual decentralisation, while the UK contends with the legacies of shifting reform agendas. Yet in both countries, the success of directly elected mayors rests not only on the formal powers they hold, but on the quality of leadership they exercise and the institutional structures that guide and constrain them.

The research offers valuable lessons for policymakers, practitioners and scholars. It suggests that accountability must be intentionally designed and continuously reinforced. Clear institutional roles, better training and development for mayors, and stronger professional support structures can all contribute to more effective local leadership. As debates about mayoral systems continue in both countries, the insights from Aki’s work provide a timely and thoughtful contribution to understanding what truly makes local democratic leadership accountable.

You can view the whole (50 mins) seminar here:
https://bham.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=76530fc7-ce2a-4884-964a-b3fd00c80704&start=1315.148058

Jason Lowther is director of Inlogov, the Institute of Local Government Studies, at the University of Birmingham