What motivates street-level bureaucrats to implement the reforms of elected politicians?

Lee, Don S.; Park, SoonAe

doi:10.1332/030557320x15955052478653

Cited by 10 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…in south Korea, where the risk of agency loss can be high between a single-term president and career civil servants, state bureaucrats are occasionally resistant to the chief executive's reform agenda. When Kim young-sam was elected in 1993 as the presidential candidate of a conservative party, he adopted major economic reforms promoting deregulation and privatization (Lee and Park 2021). However, to more liberal bureaucrats who favored an expansive economic policy and an active role for the public sector in shaping that policy, Kim's reform programs were deemed an attempt to curb their leeway.…”

Section: Don S Lee and Soonae Parkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bureaucratic Responsiveness under Dynamic Political Settings: Experimental Evidence from Local Governments

Lee

Park

2023

Legislative Studies Qtrly

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How do bureaucrats respond to legislators' demands for change in policy implementation? We distinguish between unified and divided government, where the degree of legislative oversight over bureaucratic autonomy is likely to differ, and we argue that how bureaucrats actually respond in varying executive‐legislative relations depends on their incentives shaped by greater autonomy in implementation (unified government) versus closer monitoring by legislators (divided government). Analyzing two sets of original data from list and endorsement experiments with local bureaucrats in Korea (n = 4064)—one from the period of legislative auditing and the other from the nonauditing period—we find that bureaucrats are more likely to incorporate legislators' views into their decision‐making under unified than under divided government. Furthermore, bureaucrats are more responsive to legislatures when their political ideology is congruent with that of a legislative majority than when it is incongruent, regardless of unified or divided government. Our findings have a clear implication: the importance of bureaucratic autonomy and preferences rather than monitoring as an effective tool to increase bureaucratic responsiveness.

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Section: Don S Lee and Soonae Parkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bureaucratic Responsiveness under Dynamic Political Settings: Experimental Evidence from Local Governments

Lee

Park

2023

Legislative Studies Qtrly

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“…This Special Issue and recent research in Policy & Politics offer some suggestions of what constitutes this field. It involves mainstream or positive-oriented policy process theories (Heikkila and Jones, 2022), a world of research ranging from agenda-setting to diffusion (Hawkins and McCambridge 2020;Mallinson, 2021) and expertise to policy implementation (Christensen, 2021;Straßheim 2021;Moseley and Thomann 2021;Lee and Park 2021;Ball and Head 2021). It involves the study of meaning through the interpretation of language and discourse, as embedded, for example, in emotions (Durnová, 2022).…”

Section: How Do We Conceive Of Policy and Political Studies?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Taking risks and breaking new frontiers: introduction to the Special Issue and the cardinal challenges for policy and politics scholarship

Berglund

Dunlop

Weible

2022

Policy &Amp; Politics

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This Special Issue makes a statement about the study of policy and politics, where it has been, how it is done, what it is, and where it is going. When addressing the question ‘who gets to speak for our discipline?’ we respond emphatically – many people, from many places, working in many ways. It comprises scholarship that has rarely been combined to explore some cardinal challenges about our scholarship: (1) How do we conceive of policy and political studies? (2) To what extent should our science be ‘normative’ or ‘objective’ or ‘positive’? (3) Who are our audiences, and how do we engage them? (4) Whose knowledge matters, and how does it accumulate? (5) How should we advance the study of policy and politics? We conclude charging the field to consider different ways of thinking about what we can discover and construct in the world and how we can conduct our science.

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“…On the other hand, other scholars take a more decentralized view of the effectiveness of central direction and illuminate the role of local actors’ preferences in lower-level governments’ decision-making (Brehm and Gates 1997; Elazar 1972; Jones 1975; Riccucci 2005). There are diverse local factors in play, ranging from job environments, levels of discretion in implementation, to interactions with political actors (Hedge and Scicchitano 1994; Lee and Park 2021a; Scholz, Twombly, and Headrick 1991; Wood 1992), and bureaucrats in lower-level governments react to the situations, either factual or perceived, they face in the field by determining the degree to which they will be responsive (Whitford 2007, 19).…”

Section: Hierarchical Nature In Intergovernmental Relationshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Political Crisis in Central Government and Bureaucrats’ Responses in Provincial Government: The Impact of Governors’ Characteristics

Park

Lee²

2021

Political Research Quarterly

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Scholars have debated the question of what influences bureaucrats’ policy implementation in provincial government, some taking the top-down and some the bottom-up approaches. However, less well understood in this debate is the impact of governors’ characteristics, particularly at a time of national political crisis. Given that their roles have been proven important for the performance of provincial governments, this is a significant oversight. To fill this gap, we examine the effect of governors’ political characteristics on provincial bureaucrats’ responses to the center by leveraging a unique setting, that of presidential impeachment in South Korea. Using original survey data on 655 civil servants from all 17 provincial governments, gathered as part of a representative survey, we find that bureaucrats are less responsive to the central government after impeachment. Our results show that this difference between pre- and post-impeachment is driven by several political characteristics, such as governors’ political ideology and tenure in office. Our findings have implications for the role of governors in intergovernmental relations and the management of provincial governments’ performance.

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What motivates street-level bureaucrats to implement the reforms of elected politicians?

Cited by 10 publications

References 51 publications

Bureaucratic Responsiveness under Dynamic Political Settings: Experimental Evidence from Local Governments

Bureaucratic Responsiveness under Dynamic Political Settings: Experimental Evidence from Local Governments

Taking risks and breaking new frontiers: introduction to the Special Issue and the cardinal challenges for policy and politics scholarship

Political Crisis in Central Government and Bureaucrats’ Responses in Provincial Government: The Impact of Governors’ Characteristics

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