Ministerial Leadership and Endorsement of Bureaucrats: Experimental Evidence from Presidential Governments

Abstract

Scholars have debated what constitutes effective ministerial leadership with respect to administrative competence versus political influence. The authors contribute experimental evidence to this debate through a unique survey design of endorsement experiments. Using original data from 949 national civil servants in South Korea, this article examines civil servants' assessments of ministerial leadership in three central dimensions of public management: internal management, interbranch coordination, and policy formulation/implementation. Further, existing variation in the characteristics of agencies is used to test whether such variation induces systematic differences in civil servants' responses. Findings show that that civil servants' attitudes toward ministerial leadership are asymmetric in nature. Ministers with civil service backgrounds are endorsed in all three dimensions, whereas ministers with legislative backgrounds receive increased support only for interbranch coordination skills. The levels of support for ministers with different backgrounds also vary across agency types. This analysis has implications for public management practice and agency control in presidential governments.

Bureaucratic responsiveness in times of political crisis: The case of presidential impeachment

“…In addition, although we considered and accounted for individual and organizational factors that can affect civil servants' perceptions of political leadership, such as age, gender, education level and political ideology, as well as agency heads' characteristics (Lee and Park 2020, forthcoming), our findings might be due to other factors strongly associated with civil service grades. For instance, senior civil servants at the top administrative rank nearing retirement may choose to behave as good civil servants by being responsive to the president because of outside job opportunities connected to the president or simply staying loyal to the chief executive, not wanting to be political.…”

Experimental research in the Asia-Pacific region: review and assessment of regional capacity

“…All of the studies reviewed in this article described in detail the measurement scales and operationalisation strategies adopted for the explanatory (treatment) and outcome variables. In terms of the sample selection, nine studies used a random sampling frame, such as probability (Kim, 2019), representative (Porumbescu et al, 2020) and stratified (Cai et al, 2020;Lee & Park, 2020a, 2020b sampling. The sampling approaches used in the remaining 21 studies were coded as non-random due to their explicit mention of having used a nonprobability (e.g., Kim & Kim, 2016a, 2016b, unrepresentative or convenience (Stroik et al, 2019) sampling method.…”

“…It can be seen that most of the collaborations within the Asia-Pacific region were between scholars in Hong Kong and South Korea: for instance, the papers by Walker et al (2018Walker et al ( , 2020 and Lee et al (2017). There was also co-authorship within South Korea, between Lee and Park (2020a, 2020b, 2020c and between Kim and Kim (2016a, 2016b. These coauthorship networks may explain why some researchers, institutions and countries or regions have been more active than others in applying experimental research.…”

“…Nearly half of the articles examined issues associated with organisation and management. Of these, just over half examined PSM (e.g., Christensen et al, 2013;Kim & Kim, 2016a, 2016b, and leadership (e.g., Lee & Park, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c. Forty per cent of articles examined the citizen-government relationship, focusing on policy tools (Focacci & Lam, 2020;Moseley & Stoker, 2015;Park et al, 2020;Walker et al, 2020) and performance information use (Porumbescu et al, 2020;Walker et al, 2018).…”

“…We found a similar but not identical pattern from the reviewed experimental studies, as most of them touched upon the topics of PSM, HRM, red tape, leadership, policy tools, performance information use, citizen response to social policies and non-profit management. A team of purely Asia-Pacific scholars (i.e., Seung Hyun Kim and Sangmook Kim) conducted three of the four PSM studies, whereas all four leadership studies were the results of cross-continental collaboration, including the ones conducted by Stewart et al (2015) and Lee and Park (2020a, 2020b, 2020c. Overall, the topics we found in the reviewed articles, in conjunction with those identified by Bouwman and Grimmelikhuijsen, might reflect the suitability of topics for experimental research or the agendas currently being pursued by scholars in the Asia-Pacific region.…”