The change of administrative capacity in Korea: contemporary trends and lessons

Abstract

This article empirically explores the understanding and changes in the concept of administrative capacity in the Korean context. Despite a universal consensus on its importance, administrative capacity is defined differently by regimes and stakeholders (i.e. in this study: the public, members of the National Assembly, and academia). To improve our understanding of administrative capacity, we collected three types of texts (337 academic papers, 1470 National Assembly minutes, and 3316 newspaper articles from 2000 to 2019) and analyzed the data using topic modeling and text-network analysis methods. The results suggest that although academic articles emphasized leadership, manpower, education, and other policymaking capacities, the National Assembly stressed innovation capacity in solving different policy problems. Finally, the media, assumed to reflect public opinion, emphasized capacities related to national security.

Points for practitioners

This study suggests that different types of administrative capacities could be needed according to the developmental stage of states. While managerial and administrative capacity should be developed in countries pursuing state-led economic development, governance capacity could be more requested in countries facing demands for democratization and meeting citizens’ various needs and participation.

Keywords

administrative capacity competency-based human resource management organizational capacity text analysis

Introduction¹

Public officials in Korea are under tremendous pressure when required to improve their administrative capacity (AC) by a new regime elected every five years (Boo, 2010; Kim, 2003). The Korean government has been criticized due to its hierarchical, centralized, elite-oriented, and authoritative characteristics, which have contributed to rapid economic growth over the most recent several decades of its developmental stage. As the economy stabilizes and diverse social needs arise, Korean citizens demand that their government operate with a different set of capabilities relative to the past. Recently, the Korean government has searched for ways to improve its AC in a manner that promotes public values beyond efficiency to meet such citizens’ needs; however, none of the primary stakeholders has been able to provide the government with the best measure to achieve the objective. Despite the consensus among scholars and practitioners that AC is important, it remains unclear which aspects of AC should be emphasized or what AC is in Korea. Thus, we intend to ask the following questions: “How has AC been defined and measured by regimes in recent decades?”; and “Are there any common or distinctive elements within AC that have existed over a long period of time and/or are defined according to the primary stakeholder(s) (i.e. the public, academia, and/or members of the National Assembly)?”

To answer these questions, it is important to systemically review and analyze the different views of AC held by stakeholders. In particular, we use Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a topic modeling method designed to analyze massive amounts of text-based data (i.e. articles published in major Korean public administration journals, newspaper articles, and the archived minutes of the National Assembly Committee). The analysis reveals that the definition of AC has mainly transformed from individual competency to organizational competency, including public service values. Additionally, the results show that academia focuses on policy capacity as the core component of AC, whereas the members of the National Assembly most frequently discuss innovation capacity in terms of AC.

Literature review

In the fields of political science and public administration, AC is recognized as a crucial factor explaining successful policy implementation, the building of a prosperous state, and governmental quality (Addison, 2009). However, there is a lack of consensus regarding the actual definition of AC. “Capacity” in the public sphere is an inherently complex and multilayered concept that involves components at different levels (individual, organizational, and institutional), which increases the challenge of building and evaluating capacity within government organizations (Wu et al., 2015). A fundamental difficulty in understanding AC is that the concept has been discussed at different levels of analysis. Therefore, in this section, we discuss various views of AC.

AC at the individual level

Spencer and Spencer (1993) define capacity as an individual’s traits explaining their high performance and as consisting of five elements of competence: (1) skills, (2) knowledge, (3) self-concept, (4) traits, and (5) motive. Perry (1993) and Lucia and Lepsinger (1999) criticized this definition due to its ambiguous link between competence and individual performance, leading them to suggest an exclusive focus on the observable behavioral aspects of competencies. In that sense, these studies propose that a public organization should adopt a competency-based human resource management (CBHRM) approach that integrates discrete HRM practices, including selection, training, assessment, and incentive systems, into a consistent system in a strategic manner (Kim, 2003). The basic assumption of CBHRM is that strategically trained individuals in CBHRM techniques develop job-related competencies (Lado and Wilson, 1994) and ultimately improve organizational performance in relation to their organizational goals (Cho and Kang, 2001).

Recently, scholars noted that CBHRM undermines the importance of publicness in a public organization; accordingly, they began to focus on competencies from public value perspectives. Korean scholars (e.g. Kang et al., 2015; Kim, 2017; Rho, 2007) argue that the commitment of public employees to public values is essential to improve the effectiveness of a public organization and subsequently focused on identifying key dimensions and components of public service values in the Korean context. As the interest in value-centered HRM emerged, Kang et al. (2015) adopted Kernaghan’s (2003) and Van Wart’s (1998) concepts of public service values, and developed nine components of public service values in three dimensions by drawing from survey results concerning the values with which public servants should be equipped. The first dimension, or the view of the nation, includes commitment to patriotism, democracy, and diversity; the second dimension, or the pursuit of public values, includes accountability, transparency, and justice; and the third dimension, or ethical values, comprises integrity, morality, and public interest, which focuses largely on the neutrality of public services and anti-corruption. Although the discussion continues, scholars and practitioners generally agree that the values of individual public administrators play an important role in enhancing their performance, and that, in this respect, educating administrators about these values is essential for capacity building.

AC at the organizational level

Although previous studies emphasized the role of HRM practices, particularly the performance management system, in managing AC, since the mid-2000s, some scholars have paid increasing attention to AC at the organizational and systemic levels. Organizational-level studies have generally defined AC as the capacity of the state to deal with issues of governance (Farazmand, 2009) rather than as individual traits; however, these studies use distinct approaches to defining what the key capabilities of the state include. First, one set of studies regards AC as a managerial capacity to effectively acquire and allocate organizational resources (e.g. budget, information technology, and human resources) (Ingraham and Donahue, 2000). Some of these studies identify managerial skills, abilities, and attitudes as key sources of capacity that can help governmental organizations cope with demanding challenges, as well as sustain a high level of public service (Kim, 2002).

Second, other studies highlight the importance of policy capacity comprising competencies necessary for policymaking (Wu et al., 2017). Wu et al. (2015) classify policymaking capacity into nine capacities based on the required skills (i.e. political, managerial, and analytical) and resource levels (i.e. systemic, organizational, and individual), and view AC as the government’s managerial capability to manage/acquire organizational resources. They view AC as a specific kind of capacity that requires organizational resources and managerial skills among the nine stated capacities. An imbalance between components associated with policymaking capacity can lead to policy failure and, in turn, undermine AC (Wu et al., 2017).

AC at the systemic level

In the Korean literature, the first academic discussion of the concept of AC at the systemic level was initiated by Choi and Im (2004), who criticized previous studies of AC due to an overemphasis on the capacity of individual bureaucrats rather than that of the government organization. They highlighted the role of government in managing civic participation in the policymaking process and, accordingly, suggested that the concept of AC includes the government’s ability to manage its collaborative relationships with other local agencies, citizens, and the central government. Similarly, Han and Choi (2006) defined AC as the capability to manage: (1) the government’s relationships with citizens; (2) its policymaking governance; and (3) the policy implementation process. To build such capacities, they suggested that the local government should structure its governance (including various policy actors) in a way that facilitates democratic discussion and shapes healthy discourse regarding policy affairs, which requires a fundamental reform of the government. Similarly, Moon and Joo (2007) suggested that AC be measured by citizens’ levels of political participation, as well as governmental accountability and effectiveness, regulatory quality, the rule of law, political stability, and control of corruption. Additionally, Choi et al. (2016) noted that the AC model should include networking capacity.

This view fundamentally differs from previous views at the individual or organizational levels, in that it is primarily interested in the government’s role, as a member of a society, in promoting deliberative democracy. These studies contribute to those specifically focused on AC, in that they offer new insights that broaden its conception into political- and state-level arenas. However, the discussion also raises various questions and concerns. For example, the definition of AC is unclear about whether it falls into governance capacity, policymaking capacity, managerial capacity, or political capacity, as discussed by Wu et al. (2015). In some sense, AC might indicate policymaking capacity in terms of the government steering citizen participation in the policymaking process, though this might require the political capacity to function as a policy broker that reconciles conflicting interests among various policy stakeholders. This view also involves managerial aspects, as suggested by Wu et al. (2015), in that the government requires managerial skills and knowledge to achieve the desired policy goals while facilitating a deliberative process.

We have discussed various views and concepts of AC within academia. In this context, AC is a generic term for the skills, knowledge, and characteristics necessary to perform a specific governmental function. On the other hand, the contents, preconditions, or characteristics of AC might vary depending on the political and social contexts with which the government is faced, making it difficult to rigorously investigate AC-related phenomena. Furthermore, based on regime emphasis on “managing and strengthening” competencies using performance evaluation systems, deployed by Korean administrations over the previous two decades, we speculate that the public and politicians understand AC substantially differently. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to promote our understanding of AC by exploring different views held by the public, politicians, and academia according to a systematic review of the literature and other relevant documents collected in Korea.

Methods

LDA in text analysis

LDA is a method designed to explore underlying topics from unstructured text-based data (Blei et al., 2003) and analyze that data. Public administration research has recently employed computational text analysis for various topics, including policymaking agenda setting (Jones and Baumgartner, 2005), the relationship between political consideration and agency priorities (Hollibaugh, 2019), developing measures for innovation (Pandey et al., 2017), agent morale (Marvel and McGrath, 2016), the relationship between the subjective well-being of citizens and various policies (Desouza and Jacob, 2017), and agency priorities (Hollibaugh, 2019). The growing interest in the LDA model suggests that the method is particularly beneficial for capturing semantic meanings, values, and political discourses hidden in massive amounts of text-based data. Therefore, we use the LDA model for data analysis based on an expectation that it will provide valuable insights for understanding AC in a given political context.

The LDA approach is based on two primary assumptions. First, the dimensionality, “k,” of the Dirichlet distribution is assumed to be known and fixed, and the value determines the number of topics (Blei et al., 2003; Maier et al., 2018). Second, hyperparameters α and β are determined a priori. Although a rule of thumb for determining these parameters does not exist, a previous study emphasized the importance of balancing two goals: (1) to describe data with fewer dimensions (topics); and (2) to sacrifice as little relevant information as possible (Jacobi et al., 2016). Additionally, previous studies propose that the optimal values of the parameters can be found through incremental adjustment (for a detailed methodological discussion on parameter setting, see Blei et al., 2003; Cao et al., 2009; Ghosh and Guha, 2013; Newman et al., 2011; Puschmann and Scheffler, 2016). In the present study, because the data sets were collected from three different sources, we carefully conducted this procedure to ensure that the results would produce interpretable topics. The procedure was reliable due to the heteroskedastic features of the data (Chang et al., 2009; Jacobi et al., 2016; Maier et al., 2018). Consequently, we used 6, 0.25, and 0.025 as the value of k, α, and β, respectively.

Data collection

This study explores the concept and elements of AC perceived by three primary stakeholders in the public sphere (i.e. the public, the National Assembly, and academia); accordingly, we collected data from newspapers, National Assembly minutes, and academic papers, respectively. We believe that it is important to understand the elements of AC and the differences in the three groups’ perceptions because they can potentially drive the directions of subsequent administrative reform. Previous studies generally discuss the critical role of the National Assembly and the public in initiating governmental reforms (relative to the role or will of bureaucrats) (e.g. Lim, 2008); however, we did not include data capturing the views of bureaucrats based on its unavailability. Alternatively, we did include research papers because we believe that they reveal various perspectives, including those of government bureaucrats. The detailed procedures used for data collection are described in the following.

First, we searched for news articles containing the keywords and phrases “government capacity,” “administrative capacity,” “public servant capacity,” or “administrative management capacity,” which have been used interchangeably to refer to the AC of the government, from 12 major daily newspapers, ultimately acquiring 3616 usable articles ranging from January 1, 2000, to July 31, 2019.² Second, from the same period, we collected the minutes of the National Assembly committees from the official online National Assembly Archive. As multiple agenda items were combined into a single document, we separated the subcommittee minutes by agenda in order to classify the documents into several topics. Consequently, 1470 minutes containing the keywords “capacity” and “government” or “administrative” or “administrative management” were selected for analysis. Third, we collected academic journal articles using the same criteria as those for the minutes and newspapers, and, accordingly, gathered 337 journal articles for the same time period.

Preprocessing and modeling procedures

The 5370 collected documents were preprocessed, as follows. First, we tokenized words in all documents, removed punctuation and special characters, tagged parts of speech by word, and removed all words but nouns. Second, the tf-idf Vectorizer in the Python (v.3.7) sklearn³ package (v.0.21.3) was used to vectorize words. Third, we chose substitute words and stopwords based on the extracted nouns sorted by tf-idf (Ramos, 2003), and excluded irrelevant words for the analysis. While repeating the second and third stages, we replaced substitute words and removed stopwords (Hagen et al., 2019; Walker et al., 2019). A term–document matrix including 16,204 nouns was constructed after applying tf-idf vectorization. Latent topics in the corpus and using the tf-idf matrix were modeled based on the LDA method and visualized using the LDAvis method (Sievert and Shirley, 2014) to confirm the validity of the classified topics.⁴

Results

As expected, AC is viewed differently according to the various sources and administrations (see Table 1).⁵ First, the 337 academic articles dealt with policy and innovation capacities most frequently as the important elements of AC relative to its roles in leadership, information, manpower, and relationships. On the other hand, members of the National Assembly discussed innovation and industrial capacities most frequently, and regarding policy capacity, they particularly focused on AC in the area of labor policy. The 3570 newspaper articles revealed innovation and security capacities as critical aspects of AC.

Figures 1 and 2 show the trends of topics over time, revealing that results from the National Assembly minutes indicate a somewhat consistent pattern of discussion on each topic (see Figure 1), which clearly emphasized innovation capacity over other topics. This makes sense as government reform would be expected to be a primary concern of the National Assembly in regard to AC. The results from the 337 academic papers reveal a high degree of fluctuation in topics over the time period (see Figure 2). It is difficult to discern a consistent pattern from the results; however, it appears that the emphasis ranged from innovation capacity to policymaking capacity over time.

Finally, Figures 3, 4, and 5 show the LDA results for all documents, with the findings presented according to administration since 1998. The results show a shift in emphasis from individual capacity to organizational capacity over time. At the individual level, the documents appear to regard CBHRM (information, statistics, manpower, etc.), selection- and promotion-based public service competency, and training and education as ways that enhance public service competency. At the organizational level, innovation and policymaking capacities (welfare, security, unemployment, etc.) are emphasized. The following section discusses the results from the analysis and changes in related policies.

AC at the individual level

CBHRM and the public service competency model

Across administrations (see Figures 3–5), a frequently used word was “manpower” in reference to government employees. When discussing AC, human resources have been considered the core elements of the state’s competitiveness (e.g. Cho and Kang, 2001; Kang et al., 2003; Kim 2002). These results make sense given that the Korean government has adopted Spencer and Spencer’s (1993) framework as the foundation for its model of CBHRM (e.g. Cho and Kang, 2001; Kang et al., 2003; Kim, 2002). To further develop a public service competency model for Korean central government employees, the Civil Service Commission benchmarked various models, including the executive core qualification for senior executive service of the US and the competency model of Senior Civil Services (SCS) of the UK, and enlisted 19 critical competencies in the Korean government in 2001. This generated a set of competencies comprising seven common behavioral competencies (i.e. organizational commitment, ethical awareness, client orientation, professionalism, self-control, business mind, and adaptability), four problem-solving competencies (i.e. information management, problem analysis, strategic thinking, and policy implementation and management), and eight relationship and management competencies (i.e. sense of direction, coaching and mentoring, resource and organizational management, political wisdom, communication, coordination and integration, bargaining, and cooperation).

Additionally, the Ministry of Interior and Safety (MIS) developed a public service competency model for public managers and categorized nine components, including relationship-related competencies (communication, client orientation, visioning, and coordination and integration), work-related competencies (performance-oriented, professionalism, and innovation leader), and cognitive competencies (problem analysis and strategic thinking). The National Human Resource Development Institute (NHRDI, 2018) developed an elaborate competency model comprising 17 competencies, 49 components, and 100 detailed behavioral guidelines for senior civil servants (above Grade 5) (Ha, 2008). The 17 competencies are grouped into three clusters: (1) cognitive cluster; (2) work cluster; and (3) networking cluster. Table 2 compares the three competency models employed by Civil Service Commission, MIS, and NHRDI.

Table 2.

Comparison of competency components.

CSC model (2001)	MIS model (2007)	NHRDI model (2018)
Organizational commitment
Ethical awareness
Client orientation	Client orientation	Client satisfaction
Professionalism	Professionalism
Self-control
Business mind	Performance-oriented	Performance management
Adaptability	Innovation leader
Information management
Problem analysis	Problem analysis	Problem analysis and awareness of the situation
Strategic thinking	Strategic thinking	Strategic thinking
Policy implementation
Sense of direction	Visioning	Policy planning, program planning
Coaching and mentoring		Motivation
Resource and organizational management		Organizational management
Political wisdom		Stakeholder management
Communication	Communication	Communication
Coordination and integration	Coordination and integration	Coordination and integration
Bargaining
Cooperation
		Logical thinking

CSC: Civil Service Commission.

These models appear to agree with the perspectives of Perry (1993) and Lucia and Lepsinger (1999), in that they highlight observable characteristics rather than individual attitudes or value-oriented components (e.g. self-control and ethical awareness). NHRDI (2018) clearly stated that the observability and accessibility of competencies are critical characteristics that could benefit the establishment of a competency. However, there has been a recent emphasis on the value that public servants hold. For example, during the Park administration, the Ministry of Personnel Management revised the Ethics Charter for civil servants and developed training programs to instill core public service values and competencies into public employees, believing that the value-oriented competencies of government employees guide the behavior of government officials (Yoo et al., 2017), and ultimately contribute to AC by ensuring public trust in the government and reducing unnecessary red tape.

Selection and promotion based on public service competency model

In 2006, the Regulations on Personnel Management of the SCS Corps were enacted to outline the requirements for SCS candidates (Ha, 2008). MIS developed a competency assessment instrument to evaluate an applicant for SCS in order to determine whether the candidate carries the following six competencies: (1) problem solving, (2) strategic thinking, (3) change management, (4) performance orientation, (5) client satisfaction, and (6) coordination and integration. Each candidate is required to participate in simulation-based exams, including role-playing, presentation, interviews, group discussions, and in-basket methods. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Board of Audit and Inspection of Korea also adopted similar measures to hire the SCS Corps. Additionally, agencies, such as the Korea Custom Service, Korean Intellectual Property Office, and the Rural Development Administration, adopted a competency assessment approach to promote their employees to Grade 5 officials (Jin, 2009).

Currently, the assessment model is universal across the administration; however, some studies suggest that an independent assessment center should be established in each agency in order to customize the specific needs and job characteristics (Cho and Jin, 2010; Ha et al, 2007; Kim, 2007). These studies suggest that measures and indicators of competencies should be customized based on the mission and objectives of each agency (for more details, see case studies on the National Fire Agency (Kim, 2007), Rural Development Administration (Cho and Jin, 2010), and local governments (Choi and Kim, 2010).

Training and education to enhance public service competencies

Public management scholars have criticized traditional training programs due their having been designed without consideration of the employees’ actual needs (Choi and Jo, 2007; Choi and Hwang, 2000; Yim and Hahm, 2001). The training programs are ineffective measures to improve public employee competencies given that they were only designed to screen employees for promotion (Choi and Hwang, 2000; Yim and Hahm, 2001). Other studies proposed outsourcing training programs to the private sector in order to either bring new methods of training to the public sector (Kim, 2003) or reform long-term overseas education and training systems to develop new competencies for central government organizations (Kang et al., 2003). All of these studies generally outlined the needs for reform in the training programs based on the concept of a competency-based curriculum (Choi and Jo, 2007; Kwon, 2006; Park, 2011). In particular, they argued that the training programs should be developed based on: (1) identification of organizational goals and objectives; (2) developing performance indicators and confirmation of performance gaps between desired performance goals and actual outputs; (3) modeling the competencies necessary for employees to fulfill their required tasks in both the present and future; and (4) developing a training curriculum based on the competency model (Kwon, 2006; Seo, 2018).

Since 2005, the Act on the Education and Training of Public Officials (revised in 2015 as the Act on the Capacity of Development of Public Officials) mandated the participation of government employees between Grades 5 and 9 in 100 hours of training programs annually. Additionally, government agencies are required by law to provide training opportunities for their employees in order to improve their expertise and job-related skills. The training programs for government employees are categorized into: (1) programs provided by the NHRDI (the central government agency dedicated to the education and training of public servants); and (2) customized programs provided by each government agency.

Recent efforts have been made to develop training programs to inculcate government employees with public service values; however, Korean public management scholars note that there is still room for improvement. For example, Park (2015) analyzed the composition of the training programs by hour, finding that training related to public service values comprises approximately 15% of the total training time until entry to Grade 5. However, Park (2015) stated that it is difficult to judge whether such programs effectively instill such values in government employees, especially when the organizational climate and practices do not match the newly acquired values. Additionally, Yoo et al. (2017) analyzed training programs for Grade 5 central government officials between 1968 and 2002 and found that the education of public values was emphasized more in military regimes than in democratic ones. However, this does not indicate that democratic regimes underestimate the importance of public values; rather, it shows that the importance of job performance and respect for diverse values held by individual officials in public organizations take precedence over the internalization of unified values. The challenges in the internalization of public service values largely fall into two areas: first, public officials tend to be reluctant to participate in training programs that require extensive time commitments but do not suit their needs (Lee and Ryu, 2015); and, second, although former President Geun-Hye Park emphasized the importance of public service, according to Yoo et al. (2017), it remains questionable how effective these programs are in enhancing the competencies of public servants.

AC at the organizational level

The data analysis indicates that the public does not necessarily share the same view of AC as academia. We discuss these details in the following.

Emphasis on innovation

Figures 3, 4, and 5 show that the word “innovation” was identified frequently in all administrations. Notably, words and phrases such as “innovation,” “reform,” and “administrative reform” have been used interchangeably in Korean public administration contexts. As the emphasis on innovation in the public sector has been a worldwide phenomenon, it is unsurprising to find a similar pattern in the Korean government; however, the Korean government has arguably been consistently under more intense social pressure relative to that of other countries since the unprecedented economic crisis in 1997. Many Koreans held the government responsible for its lack of capabilities in predicting and dealing with the financial crisis. The word “innovation” has been perceived as the primary characteristic required to survive in Korea ever since. The stress on innovation can also be found in the performance management system, which was adopted immediately after the crisis and mandates an annual evaluation of the government agency’s performance (Government Performance Evaluation Committee, 2019). According to the law, an agency’s efforts toward innovative practices or policies are to be evaluated as part of its performance. For these reasons, the word “innovation” has been most commonly used as a symbol or sometimes even a cliché to legitimize a governmental action.

Policy capacity as AC

Figures 3, 4, and 5 show most frequently used keywords in various policy areas and identify policy capacity as the primary element of AC. A policy is a venue where the public can directly experience what the government does and whether it functions well. The results indicate that the Korean media and the National Assembly showed their interest evenly in all four policy areas (i.e. social, political, economic, and security), as suggested by Wu et al. (2015). In particular, policies related to the science and technology industry and national security matters between North and South Korea constantly received the greatest attention from the public, regardless of administration. However, we did find variations. During the Kim and Roh administrations, policies concerning real estate regulation and balanced development between metropolitan and the other areas were the most contentious policy areas, whereas economic policy issues, such as the youth unemployment rate, labor market issues, and low economic growth, received most of the attention from the public during the Lee and Park administrations. However, attention level does not necessarily represent the degree of citizens’ trust toward the government’s AC in the area of policy. On the contrary, it would be more realistic to assume that the interest of the Congress and media was influenced by the degree of public conflict or the lack of social consensus in the policy area.

Discussion and conclusion

The primary stakeholders of the Korean government’s AC (i.e. the public, the National Assembly, and academia) have focused on diverse issues of AC in recent years. Academia values leadership, information technology, and training (education) related to policy capacity, whereas members of the National Assembly highlight innovation capacity related to specific policy issues, including unemployment, medical care, and housing. Despite such diverse interests in AC, policy and innovation capacities generally received the most attention from all of these groups. Additionally, this analysis revealed that the focus on specific aspects of AC might vary primarily depending on two factors: (1) the degree of uncertainty in public demand; and (2) the locus of control (see Figure 6).

First, when the public requires a specific need and believes that the problem can be solved by internal measures from within the government agency, more attention might be given to the competencies of individual bureaucrats and human resource practices, as shown in Korean cases. The significance of competency assessment at the individual level aligns with the emphasis on performance management, according to New Public Management (NPM), which views governmental inefficiency as the most urgent problem needing to be solved. As the sum of individual capacities is considered to be the total of an organization’s capacity from this perspective, this explains why previous studies have focused more intently on capacities at the individual level, and why CBHRM plays such an important role in strengthening the Korean government’s AC.

Second, this might also explain why there have been recent attempts to merge public service capacities into the competency model, which aims to provide public employees with guidance on the judgment of public values and the ability to internalize them. Public demands have become highly complex and uncertain; however, the government still believes that it can satisfy the public by integrating public values into the CBHRM. This will be a challenge because public service values are not easily measurable in order to evaluate performance. Accordingly, public service values and the relevant capacities are being managed by innovative leaders capable of managing their subordinates’ motivation to ensure full engagement in their pursuit of public values.

Third, since the Roh administration, governance capacity that facilitates citizens’ participation has gained increased attention. The government’s job is to listen to and communicate with citizens that make their needs known at a given time. This is why some studies highlight that AC should include new areas, such as networking (Choi et al., 2016) and communication capacity (Lee, 2018). However, when public demands are highly uncertain (as is currently the case) and possibly contradictory and/or paradoxical, maintaining good relationships with citizens cannot simply solve all of the problems. In such cases, the legitimation capacity capable of gaining public trust, bringing the public together, and mediating various conflicts of interest might be considered the most critical governmental capacity (Wu et al., 2015). The constant attention by the public on policy issues and the growing emphasis on policy capacity (Eom, 2016) can be understood within this framework.

In conclusion, because this study was conducted within a Korean context, it might be difficult to generalize the results to other countries. However, governments are faced globally with wicked and complex problems that require the capacities of more than competent public servants to address. This changing environment requires governments to function more proactively, and the recent emphasis on public service values might reflect such demands from the public. Governments worldwide must be able to “do the right thing,” as well as “do things right” in order to deliver values beyond efficiency to their citizens.

Additionally, we believe that the results of this study provide valuable lessons for many developing countries experiencing similar developmental processes to those in Korea. Specifically, under a state-led economic development system at early developmental stages, it might be important for the government to increasingly engage competent public officials within the public sphere in order to prevent corruption and improve their work capabilities. As the demands for democratization increase at later developmental stages (as in Korea), it could become critical for the government to meet citizens’ diverse needs and ensure their participation in the policymaking process. At this stage, it might be more important to rely on AC characteristics that establish sound governance and manage conflicts. Therefore, we expect that the results of this study might provide useful insights for other developing countries, as well as Korea.

Supplemental Material

sj-pdf-1-ras-10.1177_0020852320982340 - Supplemental material for The change of administrative capacity in Korea: contemporary trends and lessons

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-ras-10.1177_0020852320982340 for The change of administrative capacity in Korea: contemporary trends and lessons by Kilkon Ko, Hyun Hee Park, Dong Chul Shim and Kyungdong Kim in International Review of Administrative Sciences

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2016S1A3A2924956; NRF-2018S1A3A2075609).

ORCID iDs

Hyun Hee Park

Dong Chul Shim

Supplemental material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

Kilkon Ko is a Professor in the Graduate School of Public Administration at Seoul National University, South Korea, and Director of the Asia Regional Information Center. He is editor in chief of the Asian Journal of Political Science. His research areas include organizational theory, program evaluation in the public sector, public policy theories and application, comparative public administration, data analytics, corruption, and ethics.

Hyun Hee Park is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Administration at the Kookmin University, South Korea. She earned her PhD from the Department of Public Administration and Policy, Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, at the University at Albany—State University of New York. Her research focuses on social networks, with a particular interest in the role of social networks in career and professional development and policy networks. Dr Park’s work has been published and is forthcoming in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, American Review of Public Administration, International Public Management Journal, International Review of Public Administration, and Review of Public Personnel Administration.

Dong Chul Shim is an Associate Professor at the Department of Public Administration at the Korea University, South Korea. His research interests include public service motivation, public service value, leadership, and organizational citizenship behavior. Dr Shim’s work has been published and is forthcoming in the American Review of Public Administration, International Public Management Journal, International Review of Public Administration, and Review of Public Personnel Administration.

Kyungdong Kim is a PhD candidate in the Graduate School of Public Administration at Seoul National University, South Korea, and researcher at the Asia Regional Information Center. His research focuses on policy analysis, policy evaluation, and research methodology.

References

Addison

(2009) Is administrative capacity a useful concept? Review of the application, meaning and observation of administrative capacity in political science literature. LSE research paper.

Blei

Jordan

(2003) Latent Dirichlet Allocation. Journal of Machine Learning Research 3(1): 993–1022.

Boo

H-W

(2010) Korea’s experience with NPM-based reform: Applying the policy fashion concept. The Korean Journal of Policy Studies 25(1): 19–33.

Cao

Xia

, et al. (2009) A density-based method for adaptive LDA model selection. Neurocomputing 72(7–9): 1775–1781.

Chang

Gerrish

Wang

, et al. (2009) Reading tea leaves: How humans interpret topic models. In: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) (eds Y Bengio, D Schuurmans, J Lafferty, et al.). Vancouver, Canada, pp. 288–296.

Cho KH and Jin JS (2010) A Competency Assessment Model for Rural Development Administration. Association of Korean Public Personnel Administration.

Cho

Kang

(2001) A Study of Job Competency Assessment Model. Seoul: Korea Institute of Public Administration.

Choi

(2007) Introducing the competency-based curriculum (CBC) in the public sector: The case of the Ministry of Science and Technology. Korean Public Personnel Administration Review 6(2): 263–291.

Choi MH and Kim YW (2010) A study on the reinforcement of local public officials' competency: Focused on the competency-based curriculum. Korean Local Government Studies 13(4): 33--59.

10.

Choi

(2004) A study of administrative capacity of local governments from the structuration theory. In: Korean Association of Public Administration Conference Proceedings, Korea Association of Public Administration, Seoul, pp. 151–166.

11.

Choi

Lee

Choi

(2016) Analysis of competence level perception of female public officials in local government: Focusing on comparison of competence level perception between men and women. Korean Local Administration Review 16(1): 167–198.

12.

Choi

Hwang

(2000) A Suggestion for Improving the Education and Training System of Civil Servants. Seoul: Korea Institute of Public Administration.

13.

Desouza

Jacob

(2017) Big data in the public sector: Lessons for practitioners and scholars. Administration & Society 49(7): 1043–1064.

14.

Eom

(2016) Administrative capacity in Korea: Path-dependency and institutional drift of administrative reform. Korean Journal of Public Administration 50(4): 91–137.

15.

Farazmand

(2009) Building administrative capacity for the age of rapid globalization: A modest prescription for the twenty-first century. Public Administration Review 69(6): 1007–1020.

16.

Ghosh

Guha

(2013) What are we “tweeting” about obesity? Mapping tweets with topic modeling and Geographic Information System. Cartography and Geographic Information Science 40(2): 90–102.

17.

Government Performance Evaluation Committee (2019) Introduction to performance management in the government. Available at: http://www.evaluation.go.kr/psec/intro/intro_1_2_1.jsp

18.

(2008) Study on the determinants of the effectiveness of the senior civil service system (SCS): Government officials in Korea. Korean Journal of Public Administration 17(3): 167–205.

19.

Ha MS, Kwon YS and Cheon YS (2007) Comparative case study for developing competency assessment systems of Korean civil servants. Korean Public Personnel Administration Review 6(1): 37--79.

20.

Hagen

Keller

Yerden

, et al. (2019) Open data visualizations and analytics as tools for policy-making. Government Information Quarterly 36(4). Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2019.06.004.

21.

Han

Choi

(2006) Administrative capacity building in local government. Korean Journal of Policy Analysis and Evaluation 16(1): 183–208.

22.

Hollibaugh

(2019) The use of text as data methods in public administration: A review and an application to agency priorities. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 29(3): 474–490.

23.

Ingraham PW and Donahue AK (2000) Dissecting the black box revisited: Characterizing government management capacity. Governance and Performance: New Perspectives. Washington,DC: Georgetown University Press, pp. 292--318.

24.

Jacobi

Van Atteveldt

Welbers

(2016) Quantitative analysis of large amounts of journalistic texts using topic modeling. Digital Journalism 4(1): 89–106.

25.

Jin

(2009) Competency-based human resources management in government: Policy issues and lessons. Korean Policy Sciences Review 13(1): 1–23.

26.

Jones

Baumgartner

(2005) The Politics of Attention: How Government Prioritizes Problems. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

27.

Kang

Ryu

Park

, et al. (2015) A Study on Reestablishment and Internationalization of Public Service Value. Seoul, South Korea: Korea Institute of Public Administration.

28.

Kang

Kwon

(2003) Improvement of long-term overseas education and training system for public officials to improve government capability. Korean Public Personnel Administration Review 2(2): 63–88.

29.

Kernaghan

(2003) Integrating values into public service: The values statement as centerpiece. Public Administration Review 63(6): 711–719.

30.

Kim

(2003) Introduction and development of competency-based human resource management (CBHRM): A situational approach for Korean companies. POSRI Study of Management and Economy 3(1): 120–158.

31.

Kim

(2002) Promoting cooperation between government and corporate training institutions for enhancing the competence of public officials. Korean Policy Studies Review 11(1): 81–111.

32.

Kim SH (2007) Recommendations on successful e-learning for competency of fire-fighter. Proceeding of Korean Institute of Fire Science and Engineering 4: 361--366.

33.

Kim

(2017) Public service values of the civil servants in the Korean central government: Developing and testing the model of public service values. The Korean Journal of Public Administration 26(2): 1–41.

34.

Kwon

(2006) A study on competency-based education and training for public officials. Korean Public Personnel Administration Review 5(1): 129–148.

35.

Lado

Wilson

(1994) Human resource systems and sustained competitive advantage: A competency-based perspective. Academy of Management Review 19(4): 699–727.

36.

Lee

Ryu

(2015) The suggestion of the local government public service reform. The Korea Local Administration Review 29(2): 3–29.

37.

Lee

(2018) Antecedents and consequences of performance appraisal system towards government communication capacity: On the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety in the Republic of Korea. Journal of Communication Science 18(2): 185–221.

38.

Lim

(2008) Administrative reform—Korea, Japan, the UK, and the US: A comparative perspective. Korean Association for Policy Science 12(2): 197–230.

39.

Lucia

Lepsinger

(1999) Art & Science of Competency Models. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

40.

Maier

Waldherr

Miltner

, et al. (2018) Applying LDA topic modeling in communication research: Toward a valid and reliable methodology. Communication Methods and Measures 12(2/3): 93–118.

41.

Marvel

McGrath

(2016) Congress as manager: Oversight hearings and agency morale. Journal of Public Policy 36(3): 489–520.

42.

Moon MJ and Joo KW (2007) A comparative study on government size, scope of function and strength of government in three administration. Korean Journal of Public Administration 45(3): 51--79.

43.

Newman

Bonilla

Buntine

(2011) Improving topic coherence with regularized topic models. In: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (eds Z Ghahramani, M Welling, C Cortes, et al.), Granada, Spain, pp. 496–504.

44.

NHRDI (National Human Resource Development Institute) (2018) How to develop public service competencies. Available at: http://www.nhi.go.kr/upload/basicBook/01.pdf

45.

Pandey

Miller

(2017) Measuring innovativeness of public organizations: Using natural language processing techniques in computer-aided textual analysis. International Public Management Journal 20(1): 78–107.

46.

Park

(2011) Changes in public personnel reform (comparative study between 2005 and 2011). Korean Public Personnel Administration Review 10(3): 1–22.

47.

Park

(2015) A theoretical evaluation of internalizing public service value: Focusing on the implication for the field of education and training. Korean Public Personnel Administration Review 14(3): 191–217.

48.

Perry

(1993) Strategic human resource management. Review of Public Personnel Management 13(1): 59–71.

49.

Puschmann

Scheffler

(2016) Topic modeling for media and communication research: A short primer. SSRN Electronic Journal. HIIG Discussion Paper Series No. 2016-05, Available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2836478.

50.

Ramos

(2003) Using tf-idf to determine word relevance in document queries. In: Proceedings of the Twentieth International Conference on Machine Learning, vol. 242 (eds T Fawcett and N Mishra), Washington, DC, pp. 133–142.

51.

Rho

(2007) Analysis and reestablishment of Korean public service values. Re-examination of Korean public service values and search for new public service value. Paper presented at the Conference of Seoul Association for Public Administration, Jeju Island, pp. 73--97.

52.

Seo

(2018) A study on the disparity between the importance and the degree of performance by local public officials’ administrative competency. Korean Journal of Local Government & Administration Studies 32(3): 159–176.

53.

Sievert

Shirley

(2014) LDAvis: A method for visualizing and interpreting topics. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Interactive Language Learning, Visualization, and Interfaces (eds J Chuang, S Green, M Hearst, et al.), Baltimore, MD, pp. 63–70.

54.

Spencer

(1993) Competence at Work: Models for Superior Performance. New York, NY: J. Wiley & Sons.

55.

Van Wart

(1998) Changing Public Sector Values. New York, NY: Garland.

56.

Walker

Chandra

Zhang

, et al. (2019) Topic modeling the research–practice gap in public administration. Public Administration Review, online, July 28.

57.

Ramesh

Howlett

(2015) Policy capacity: A conceptual framework for understanding policy competences and capabilities. Policy and Society 34(3/4): 165–171.

58.

Ramesh

Howlett

, et al. (2017) The Public Policy Primer: Managing the Policy Process. New York, NY: Routledge.

59.

Yim

Hahm

(2001) Improvement of the educational training program for the public service: Institution, management, incentive. Korean Society and Public Administration 21(1): 113–130.

60.

Yoo

Jung

Kim

, et al. (2017) Analysis of the entry-level training program of Korean public officials: Focusing on the new grade 5 officials program. Korean Society and Administration 28(3): 113–149.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.55 MB

The change of administrative capacity in Korea: contemporary trends and lessons

Abstract

Points for practitioners

Keywords

Introduction 1

Literature review

AC at the individual level

AC at the organizational level

AC at the systemic level

Methods

LDA in text analysis

Data collection

Preprocessing and modeling procedures

Results

AC at the individual level

CBHRM and the public service competency model

Selection and promotion based on public service competency model

Training and education to enhance public service competencies

AC at the organizational level

Emphasis on innovation

Policy capacity as AC

Discussion and conclusion

Supplemental Material

sj-pdf-1-ras-10.1177_0020852320982340 - Supplemental material for The change of administrative capacity in Korea: contemporary trends and lessons

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iDs

Supplemental material

Notes

References

Supplementary Material

Introduction¹