Agency Heads’ Public Profiles and Bureaucratic Performance

Abstract

Do agency heads’ public profiles enhance the performance of bureaucratic agencies? Existing studies of public administration emphasize the role of public information in managing government performance. However, whether public attention to agency heads affects the performance of their agencies is largely understudied. Using a unique dataset of agency heads’ public profiles in South Korea, we predict that such profiles have a positive impact on their agencies’ performance. Although agency heads are not held accountable directly to citizens, close public attention to agency heads’ activities may function as an indirect mechanism of accountability and of improving their organizations’ performance. Our analysis supports our prediction and further suggests that an agency head’s high public profile is a benefit, particularly in more salient policy areas where “going public” is more effective for their policy reforms. Our findings have clear implications: the importance of agency heads’ unconventional roles for effective agency management, responding to rapidly changing external environments.

Keywords

agency head public profile bureaucratic performance South Korea

There has been a long line of literature concerning how top executive appointees’ individual characteristics affect the performance of government agencies. Some studies emphasize the appointees’ biographical characteristics that can shape their leadership skills, such as education, work experience, and political experience (e.g., Andrews & Boyne, 2010; Boyne, 2003; Lee & Schuler, 2020; Wolf, 1993), and others highlight the importance of their leadership styles (Moore, 1995; Hart & Tummers, 2019). However, largely unconsidered in existing studies is how the appointees’ public persona impacts their performance. In charge of administering bureaucratic agencies, ministers are presidents’ political agents and bureaucrats’ managerial principals, but they are also the public face of the government’s performance within a given issue area (Andeweg, 2000). They consider changing agency policies in response to public opinion, which should influence policy outcomes and bureaucratic performance (Lewis, 2008). As such, ministers’ public profiles may play an important role in determining how the ministry performs.¹

Thus far, most research on political elites’ public profiles has investigated their effect through electoral outcomes. That is, accountability in democratic governments is often understood as principals (i.e., citizens) seeking to reward or punish agents (i.e., elected politicians) via votes, which is termed “electoral accountability” (Ferejohn, 1986). On the other hand, much less is known about how citizens can hold appointed politicians accountable. In this article, we demonstrate that, although ministers are not held accountable directly to citizens, close public attention to ministers’ activities may function as an indirect mechanism of accountability and of improving their ministries’ performance. Although a high level of public attention might create an extra administrative burden for ministers, it is their ability to attract public attention that can help pressure potentially resistant legislators and thus win support for policies.

In order to test this intuition more systematically, we analyze unique data on ministers’ public profiles and the performance of government agencies in South Korea. Of significance to this article, we construct original measures of (1) a minister’s public profile based on Google Trends (i.e., the number of times citizens searched for that minister) and (2) agency performance based on annual evaluations by the independent assessment committee in South Korea, which are open to the public. The results of proportional-hazards models, adopted to estimate effectively the impact of monthly varying public profiles data, show support for our predictions. We find that the higher ministers’ public profiles are, the more likely that the performance of their ministries improves vis-à-vis that of a previous year, after controlling for ministers’ political and demographic characteristics, as well as organizational and contextual factors, such as presidents’ public prestige and agencies’ public profiles. Moreover, we also find that a minister’s high public profile is a benefit particularly in more salient policy areas where “going public” is more effective for their policy reforms (Kernell, 2007).

Our findings make clear contributions to the theory and practice of public management and executive politics. Most research on ministerial leadership and agency performance tends to focus on the role of agency heads in conventional dimensions, such as internal management and interbranch coordination (Lee et al., 2010; Lee & Park, 2020). However, the growing importance of external environments and rapidly changing circumstances surrounding the bureaucracy requires expanding the scope of executive management research and practice (O’Toole & Meier, 2015). In particular, more attention needs to be paid to new areas of management that can be important responsibilities of ministers, such as attracting broader public support for the ministry and its reform policies, communicating with clients and stakeholders, and promoting innovative policies for the future.² Our analysis suggests that ministers’ high profiles in the public arena can indeed make a difference to agency performance in general and the performance of “high-policy” agencies in particular.

Performance Outcomes and the Role of Ministerial Leadership

Bureaucratic performance is a main theme of public administration research, and every theory related to public management and organizations concerns aspects of public sector performance, either implicitly or explicitly (Boyne, 2003; Rainey, 2009). Assessing bureaucratic performance and analyzing what impacts agency performance are challenging tasks, because the nature of conceptualizing and assessing bureaucratic performance produces a number of challenges to current research on this subject, ranging from its conceptual ambiguity to multidimensional elements (Andersen et al., 2016). Yet, there have been significant efforts to improve and develop performance frameworks and to investigate what leads to high or low performance in bureaucracies. Among many factors affecting bureaucratic performance, including spending, regulation, market structure, and management (Boyne, 2003), one key component of management, on which this article focuses, is leadership of ministers.

In general, there is a massive literature on the importance of leadership at various managerial levels in bureaucratic performance (e.g., Andrews & Boyne, 2010; Boyne et al., 2011; Fernandez et al., 2010). The significance of top executive appointees’ leadership skills in bureaucratic performance lies in the fact that they are not only political appointees from the president’s perspective but also public managers from bureaucrats’ perspective. Public administration research demonstrates that agency heads play a consequential role in altering agency policies, affecting policy outcomes, and improving agency performance (Andrews & Boyne, 2010; Boyne, 2003; Boyne et al., 2011; Lewis, 2008; Wolf, 1993; Wood & Waterman, 1994). Agency heads are in a position where they interpret ambiguous laws into policy, make decisions on the distribution of resources within the agency, and promote their agencies’ interests through stimulating a sense of collaboration among bureau managers and employees (Balla & Gormley, 2017; Lewis, 2008).

Existing research on top executive appointees’ leadership has investigated their individual characteristics and leadership styles (Moore, 1995; Hart & Tummers, 2019) or has examined their roles within organizations, across branches, or with other institutions, such as legislative committees and the office of the presidency (Andeweg, 2000; Marsh et al., 2000). Some studies show the positive effects of their transformational (Paarlberg & Lavigna, 2010) and transactional leadership (Wright & Pandey, 2010), while other studies demonstrate mixed findings about their impact on public sector performance (Bellé, 2014). Furthermore, given that ministers are uniquely situated as managerial principals and political agents, they are expected to supervise public employees as well as coordinate with other political institutions, and scholars have linked such roles with ministers’ leadership styles. Along with the dimension of the administrative competence and political responsiveness trade-off, existing studies have explored department-centered versus president-centered leadership (Lee et al., 2010), bureaucratic professional versus political coordinator leadership (Lee & Park, 2020), or transactional versus transformational leadership (Trottier et al., 2008) as effective ministerial leadership styles.

Although agency heads’ roles in conventional public management dimensions are certainly important, what has received less attention in the literature is their ability to engage in broader, external environments with citizens, and other stakeholders. The leader’s ability to appeal broadly should function just as importantly from the perspective of agency management and bureaucratic performance. It will not only positively shape the perceptions of followers who conceptualize leader behaviors within organizations (Meindl, 1995; Nielsen & Moynihan, 2017) but also enhance beliefs about agencies’ capacity among those outside the organization (Carpenter, 2014). In particular, because citizens’ and other stakeholders’ judgments often form central aspects of measuring agency performance in public management research (Andrews et al., 2006; Walker & Boyne, 2006), such reputation and perception of agencies, in observers’ eyes, can actually lead to improvement in the assessment of agency performance. Political science research also regards to such abilities of ministers as important, because directly appealing to the public by going over the heads of lawmakers may sometimes be an effective strategy for their successful policy making and implementation (Kernell, 2007; Lee, 2018a).

In addition, today’s agency heads should be in a position where they are expected or required to perform more than conventional managerial and coordinating roles. Responding to rapidly changing external environments, agency heads’ role in developing and broadly communicating a new organizational vision is in particularly high demand. Therefore, to be effective ministers, they may rather promote major innovative programs, mobilize more resources for the projects, and actively communicate with stakeholders, clients, and congressional leaders, while harmlessly delegating internal agency management affairs to their deputy heads. In sum, given the importance of various external circumstances beyond the bureaucratic organization and the executive branch, the ability of ministers to attract broad attention from the public and the media will be necessary in achieving effective management and performance.

Ministers’ Public Profiles and Bureaucratic Performance

By highlighting the centrality of ministers’ ability to appeal to the public, we can now ask the question: How does this ability impact their agency’s performance? A particular element of the concept discussed in this article—the ability to attract attention—is a key component of political competence and business leadership skills according to the general politics and management literature (Hambrick, 2007; Lee & Schuler, 2020). According to this literature, the ability to attract attention is central to top managers winning support, which can be useful for pressuring a base of potential opposition to support their agenda. Existing studies of ministers also show that ministers’ ability to attract attention helps them to construct a coalition of support among colleagues or the public for oneself or for a policy, which is distinguished from one’s knowledge or expertise within a particular policy area (Lee & Schuler, 2020). Through the skill of rhetoric or other abilities to persuade, ministers can make a public case for themselves or the policies they promote.

In connection with the bureaucratic performance, we expect that ministers’ public profiles can potentially improve agency performance through two channels in the policy process. First, although ministers are not held accountable directly to citizens, close public attention to ministers’ activities can function as an indirect mechanism of accountability and of improving their agencies’ performance. As illustrated in Figure 1, the political process of presidential systems described through a delegation mechanism displays a clear principal-agent relationship, where citizens, as a principal, elect the president, who in turn, as an agent, appoints cabinet ministers, to delegate the authority to draft and implement policy (Strøm, 2000). Within this structural form of accountability, citizens pass judgment on the conduct of policy enforcement and indicate their (dis)pleasure through public opinion or their representatives in the legislature (Bovens et al., 2014). The functioning of “public accountability” therefore pressures chief executives to take action on their cabinet, which, as a result, may force ministers to be held accountable for their agencies’ performance.

Figure 1.

Delegation mechanism in presidential democracy.Source: Lee (2020), Strøm (2000).

Second, ministers with a high public profile can leverage their ability to reach out to the public in the policy process by putting pressure on lawmakers to support the top executive appointees’ policy initiatives and by garnering greater respect from bureaucrats who will be more amenable to implementing those programs. First and foremost, getting policy agendas enacted and executed requires legislative support for the policy itself as well as for the mobilization of coalitions and resource attraction. The intensity and concentration of public attention paid to top executive appointees may grant them an increased ability to persuade lawmakers; and even when they encounter disagreement from lawmakers, high public profiles can make their public appeals an effective strategy, because such a support base affords them greater autonomy (Carpenter, 2014). Indeed, there are abundant real-world cases of top executive appointees engaging the public to directly pressure uncooperative politicians into supporting their reform agenda.³

Moreover, ministers’ high public profiles, which help to wield influence over the legislature, advocate for their agencies’ policy initiatives and positions, and coordinate with other ministries (Marsh et al., 2000), also matter in every aspect of the political process, ranging from the legislative confirmation of their nomination to the policy implementation process. In public hearings where candidates’ qualifications are screened, nominees with a high public profile may more easily obtain legislative confirmation due to pressures on the committee, which will have positive implications for agency performance (see Hollibaugh 2015).⁴ Ministers are also often called to be present before legislative committees to answer their questions and defend the agency’s performance, and the appointees’ high public profiles can help to overcome challenges posed by the committees.

From bureaucrats’ point of view, since they are aware that such clout is necessary for their agencies, they may endorse and emulate their agency heads’ leadership style (Lee & Park, 2020). Subordinates actively form their roles as partners or participants through interacting with their leaders, as their views are socially constructed in the leadership process (Meindl, 1995). According to this “romance of leadership” perspective, public employees under the leadership of ministers with attention-attracting abilities will not only attempt to conform to their example but may also be more active in policy formation and assessment within organizations (De Vries et al., 2016). Ultimately, agency heads’ high public profiles and such reactions from their employees will have positive implications for their agencies’ performance.

In sum, building on this discussion, we expect that, holding all else equal, a minister’s higher public profile, vis-à-vis no such strong support base, will potentially benefit rather than harm the performance of an agency. Therefore, our first hypothesis is:

Hypothesis 1. The higher ministers’ public profiles are, the more likely their agencies’ performance improves.

Policy Areas, Ministers’ Public Profiles, and Agency Performance

Ministers’ ability to attract attention to their agency and its policy initiatives should be important for any agency’s performance, but it may matter more to some agencies due to the characteristics of the agencies’ policy areas, the environments in which their policies are formulated and implemented, and the importance and visibility of the policies (Bozeman, 1987; Carpenter, 2014). For example, as the innermost center of the cabinet, policy areas, such as finance, foreign affairs, national security, and legal affairs, form the “core” of the government that needs top executive officials’ skills in coordinating across these agencies (Dunleavy & Rhodes, 1990). In this regard, ministers’ high public profiles and their rhetorical skills can be an asset in building coalitions among colleagues about a policy in these key areas.

Existing research on the allocation of cabinet portfolios also suggests that this is likely to be the case, because all ministries are not equal regarding their prestige and influence, and nominees with different skill sets tend to receive different types of positions (Lee & McClean, 2021; Lee & Schuler, 2020). Policy areas covering the most visible and important duties in every government are classified as “high-prestige” ministries. They carry a higher rank than other ministries and deal with more power or financial resources (Lee & Schuler, 2020). At the same time, they require greater accountability as their performance directly affects the whole government’s reputation and political fate (Lee, 2018b). Therefore, these positions will need agency heads’ abilities to construct a broad support base among the public for their reform policies.

Then there is the other set of policy areas concerning public goods provision or the allocation of other resources, such as health, education, or transportation. These positions are called “medium-prestige” ministries, as they control some public resources but carry less power and influence than the high-prestige ministries. Since their main duties concern more equal distribution of government resources that should benefit broader society, appointees’ knowledge and technical expertise in these fields will be more relevant than their abilities to mobilize attention. In addition, the remaining policy areas, including minority, local, or consumer affairs, have less access to power or resources. As they carry a lower rank and are less attractive than the higher-prestige ministries, they are called “low-prestige” ministries. Skills necessary or valued for this type of post could be civil service or related experience in these fields.

Given the relative scarcity of ministerial posts and individual nominees’ different abilities and backgrounds (Lee, 2018b), ministries in the three different groups will benefit more from appointees with the most suitable leadership skills and qualities. Specifically, ministers’ higher public profiles will be more effective for the performance of “high-prestige” ministries than that of other ministries. Therefore, our second hypothesis is:

Hypothesis 2. Ministers’ higher public profiles are more likely to improve the performance of “high-prestige” ministries than that of other ministries.

Data and Measurement

In our empirical analysis, we test the two hypotheses relying on data from South Korea. Our data come from all 18 ministries in South Korea, and information on the composition of the cabinet, with a list of ministers, was obtained from the CIA Directory of Chiefs of State and Cabinet Members of Foreign Governments and the Political Handbook of the World. Biographical information on ministers was collected from Keesing’s Record of World Events, academic publications, government websites, and news reports. In Appendix Table A1, we provide a list of all ministries and the number of observations from each ministry included in our analysis.

Independent Variables. The main innovation of our research is to test our predictions on an original dataset of public profiles using Google search data. Since there is no public opinion data available for ministers in a time series manner, Google Trends is a useful information source to measure ministers’ public profiles. Google Trends is a measure of search volume going back to 2004 and has been widely used among scholars to measure public interest in political elites and diverse real-world events (e.g., Mellon, 2014). We create our scores of public profiles for all ministers from South Korea between 2004 and 2016. As the measure provided by Google Trends is a relative score, we employ each of the search terms (i.e., a minister’s full name) against the highest searched political figure in South Korea during the same period of time. In all, this leads to a 2,088 ministry-month dataset of 232 ministers over time. In Appendix Figure A1, we provide a screenshot of the Google search page which was actually used to generate a minister’s Trends scores and shows the variation in the public profile measurement on a monthly basis.

Yet, using search data as proxies for measures of public profiles necessitates appropriate validity checking, in order to claim that the trends in search data track those in the broader population (Mellon, 2014). South Korea offers an environment close to ideal to measure top executive appointees’ public profiles through Google Trends, because the country’s Internet penetration ratio is 93%, and Google dominates in its search market by taking a majority of the market share.⁵

Then, it is important to check whether the searches are identical to what we intend to measure (i.e., content validity). The ministers’ search index needs to measure the salience of specific ministers we observe, not other celebrities with the same names. By looking at the top searches that include the search term of interest and properly addressing irrelevant searches, we attempted to avoid as many of them as possible.⁶

Furthermore, we must validate the search data in such a way that they reflect the positive dynamics of public interest. Our conceptualization of a minister’s public profile is closely related to the degree to which she draws attention from the general public, which may develop into a personal base of support for the minister. Our goal concerns using Google Trends to track public support for ministers and requires making their search index distinct from levels of public interest incurred by negative information and events, such as scandals. We address this concern by including in our models a categorical variable indicating a minister’s involvement in negative issues in a given month. Other than well-known cases searchable online and issues mentioned in newspaper articles, we also looked for evidence that the spikes in Google Trends were driven by scandals.⁷

Lastly, our validity check involves testing if Google Trends data are good proxies for a measure of the public perception of government officials. According to our argument, increased public attention leads to greater mobilization and stronger support, thereby resulting in political or policy success. Although it is ideal to test this relationship via public opinion data, there is, unfortunately, little public opinion data on ministers. Instead, we attempt to make the connection between public attention and political success by comparing with public opinion data from legislative elections.

For this, we first randomly choose close single-member district (SMD) elections from recent legislative elections in South Korea as well as in Japan and Taiwan, and then compare the election results with candidates’ Trends scores. Our randomly selected samples include Jin Yeong (42.8%) versus Hwang Chun-ja (39.9%) from Yongsan District in Seoul City, South Korea, in April 2016; Shiori Yamao (46.6%) versus Junji Suzuki (44.4%) from District 7 in Aichi Prefecture, Japan, in December 2014; and Yen Kuan-heng (46.7%) versus Chen Shih-kai (43.7%) from Constituency 2 in Taichung City, Taiwan, in January 2016.⁸ Calculating their average Trends scores, we find that winners had an average profile of 10.7 vis-à-vis 0.04 for losing candidates. This finding suggests that Google Trends data can be good proxies to measure the public perception of government officials and that their use may be generalizable beyond the Korean context.

The other component of our theory is that ministers’ public profiles or their ability to attract public interest should matter more in “high-prestige” ministries than others. We therefore operationalize a set of independent variables for types of cabinet posts by borrowing the template from previous research on cabinet appointments and classify all ministries into high-, medium-, and low-prestige ones (Lee & McClean, 2021; Lee & Park, 2018; Lee & Schuler, 2020). Accounting for the characteristics of agency posts is important, because some agency heads tend to attract greater attention to their activities and statements due to the nature of their tasks, as in the case of the prime minister of Korea, who often communicates government recommendations at large to the public by appearing on TV. Moreover, activities and statements of agency heads are more likely to be covered via social networking sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, in the case of higher-profile positions. The classification of ministries is shown in Table 1.

Table 1.

Classification of Ministries by Prestige Type.

High-prestige	Defense and National/Public Security	Government/Interior/Home Affairs Justice
	Finance and Economy	Prime/Deputy Prime Minister
	Foreign Affairs	Justice
Medium-prestige	Agriculture, Forestry, & Food	Labor and Manpower
	Communications and Information	Land, Infrastructure, & Transportation
	Construction and Public Works	Maritime Affairs, Fisheries, & Oceans
	Education	Planning and Development
	Energy and Natural Resources	Political Affairs
	Environment	Trade, Industry, & Commerce
	Health and Social Welfare	Unification
	Science and Technology
Low-prestige	Children, Family and Women's Affairs	Administrative Reform
	Culture	Sports and Tourism
	Displaced Persons & Expatriates	Minority Affairs
	Regional and Local Affairs

Sources: Lee & McClean (2021), Lee & Schuler (2020).

Dependent Variable. To estimate our dependent variable, the information on each ministry’s annual performance is based on performance indicators issued by the Office for Government Policy Coordination under the Prime Minister’s Office in South Korea.⁹ Since 2004, after the enactment of the Framework Act on Government Performance Evaluation, the Government Performance Evaluation Committee—an independent committee cochaired by a prime minister and a nongovernmental expert and composed of 10 experts from the private sector—has adopted indicators to assess several different aspects of agency performance at the ministry level on an annual basis.¹⁰ In total, there are seven assessment categories: (1) Innovation and Reform, (2) Legal Obligations and Recommendations, (3) Regulatory Reform, (4) Risk Management, (5) Transparency, (6) Public Relations, and (7) Customer Satisfaction.¹¹ Each ministry is evaluated category by category and given letter grades, ranging through excellent, good, and average to poor, within each category. For our analysis, we use an ordinal scale from 1 (poor) to 4 (excellent) and average scores from each category to create a total score for each ministry per year.¹² In Figure 2, we demonstrate the distribution of total scores of agency performance based on the information on each ministry’s annual performance released in the following year.

Figure 2.

Distribution of agency performance scores.Note: A unit of analysis in our dataset is a ministry-year.

The performance indicator, created by the independent evaluation committee, has clear strengths in validity and practicality. Often, skepticism arises about the validity of perceptual performance indicators, particularly those relying on citizens’ perceptions, because the public may have a limited ability to evaluate the quality of services that do not directly affect them (Andrews et al., 2006). An objective measure of agency performance based on the assessment of an independent committee, which is publicly available, will thus facilitate comparisons across agencies and over time.

In estimating the improvement in agency performance, we classify agencies as “recording better performance” when their average annual scores are higher than those from a previous year, which is coded 1; and 0 otherwise (i.e., same or worse performance compared to a previous year). Since creating a dichotomous variable means a loss of information, we rerun the same analysis with a continuous dependent variable for robustness below.

Table 2 displays the proportion of ministry-years that are classified into performance improvement or not, comparing with a previous year, and their ministers’ average Trends scores. In looking at the data, consistent with our predictions, ministers in agencies improving in performance have higher public profiles than those failing to achieve such improvement, for all levels of prestige. In aggregate, ministers from improved agencies have an average profile of 3.88, compared to 3.29 for those from agencies failing to improve. Similarly, for high-prestige ministries, ministers from improved agencies have an average profile of 5.26, compared to 4.38 for those from agencies not gaining improvement. This means that ministers from high-prestige ministries achieving improvement have higher profiles than those from ministries that are at the same level of prestige but do not obtain improvement. These findings provide initial support for our predictions. In addition, in medium-prestige (3.03 vs. 2.60) and low-prestige (4.51 vs. 3.90) ministries, an average profile of ministers from agencies gaining improvement is higher than that of ministers from agencies failing to improve. Whether this finding is robust to more sophisticated multivariate analysis will be tested in the next section.

Table 2.

Improvement of Agency Performance and Average Trends Scores.

	Agency Performance
	Improved	Not improved
Total
N	58	174
Proportion	25.0%	75.0%
Average Profiles	3.88	3.29
Total	232 (100%)
High-prestige Ministries
N	18	52
Proportion	25.7%	74.3%
Average Profiles	5.26	4.38
Total	70 (100%)
Medium-prestige Ministries
N	34	101
Proportion	25.2%	74.8%
Average Profiles	3.03	2.60
Total	135 (100%)
Low-prestige Ministries
N	6	22
Proportion	21.4%	78.6%
Average Profiles	4.51	3.90
Total	28 (100%)

Note: A unit of analysis in our dataset is a ministry-year.

Control Variables. For statistical analysis, all our models include a host of biographical and occupational information on ministers that may affect their public profiles. This information includes age (in years), gender (1 if a minister is female and 0 otherwise), education (1 for a bachelor’s degree; 2 for a master’s degree; 3 for a doctoral degree), legislative experience (the length of service as a member of the National Assembly in years), party affiliation (1 if a minister is from the president’s party and 0 otherwise), and career background (1 if a minister is from the civil service and 0 otherwise).

There are two main reasons that we account for these variables. First, some agency heads might be better at cultivating public attention because of their inherent characteristics, such as age, or because of their skills based on legislative experience or party affiliation. Second, it is possible that incompetent agency heads may gain attention by making provocative statements, and, as measures of agency heads’ technical and political competence adopted in the literature (e.g., Lee, 2020; Lee & Schuler, 2020), accounting for education level and legislative experience should address this possibility.

In addition, other than the dichotomous variable accounting for negative events and issues related to ministers (Scandal), we control for a set of political and economic variables that might affect ministers’ public profiles and the performance of their agencies. First, a variable that needs to be accounted for is a president’s public prestige, because a minister’s public profile and her agency’s performance can be affected by her relationship with the president. The president’s public prestige and his influence over a minister are not exactly the same, but they should be closely associated conceptually. Our measure of the president’s public prestige is based on presidential approval ratings from monthly public opinion surveys.¹³ Second, we control for an agency’s public profile to distinguish its impact from that of a minister’s public profile. Often, the significance of tasks or the salience of policies brings attention to ministers, which in turn may affect their agencies’ performance. Our measure of agency profile is based on its Google Trends score. Third, we account for the size of the budget and staff, as they can affect agencies’ capacity.¹⁴ Lastly, we also control for a number of economic and political contextual factors that may affect bureaucratic performance: (1) the monthly change in the consumer price index as a proxy for a measure of economic crisis, (2) scores from the Gini index as a measure of income inequality, (3) scales from the corruption perception index as a measure of corruption levels at the country level, (4) an unemployment rate per year, (5) an annual GDP growth rate, (6) the proportion of enacted bills that are proposed by the executive branch among the entirety of passed bills, (7) the proportion of legislative seats occupied by the president’s party, (8) the termination of an individual minister and (9) that of the presidential administration indicated as dichotomous variables, and (10) the electoral cycle measured as the number of days left until the end of the president’s term. In the appendix, Table A2 shows descriptive statistics for all independent and control variables.

Methods

For multivariate analysis, our main model is built on a form of the Cox proportional-hazards model. Our dependent variable is the hazard rate of an agency’s performance improvement, meaning the rate at which an agency performs better at a given time, conditional on not yet experiencing the increased performance. The hazard rate of performance improvement is a latent variable—what we observe is an agency’s performance in a given time until it is enhanced or not. Given the structure of our data, where Google search data are updated in real time but the annual performance of agencies is observed at the end of the year and released in the following year, our analysis should be robust to reverse causality and the choice of the proportional-hazards model is appropriate.

Proportional-hazards models have been widely used in minister studies to estimate the probabilities of the survival of cabinets or the promotion of ministers (e.g., Lee & Schuler, 2020). Since our measure of public profiles is a monthly-varying covariate during the observed time period for each agency (see Appendix Figure A1), the most effective way to capture this variation without averaging them within an agency-year is using a variant of the survival-time model, called a random-effects parametric survival-time model. In all models, we estimate cluster-robust standard errors for individual-level panels that are nested within an agency, in order to address complexities caused by the time series properties of the search data, such as serial correlation (Mellon, 2014). In addition, we also estimate agency performance varying across ministries and over time, using linear models with a lagged dependent variable and report the results in the robustness section below.

Results

In this section, we unravel the contribution of each factor—public profiles and ministry types—on ministries’ hazard rates. Table 3 displays the effect of our key independent variables discussed above on the probabilities of ministries’ performance improvement. Model 1 of Table 3 presents the results of the impact of ministers’ public profiles on their agencies’ performance in general. Models 2–4 of Table 3 present the impact of ministers’ public profiles on their agencies’ performance, conditional on levels of prestige in cabinet posts. In Cox proportional-hazards models, a hazard ratio above one means a greater likelihood of improvement as the value of the covariate increases, while hazard ratios below one indicate that agencies are less likely to improve performance with an increase in the value of the covariate. Due to limited space, Table 3 only presents the results of our key independent variables, while Appendix Table A3 shows the results of full model specifications.

Table 3.

The Determinants of Agency Performance: Hazard Ratios from Cox Models.

	(1)	(2)	(3)	(4)
	General	High-prestige	Med-prestige	Low-prestige
Trends score	1.065***	1.073***	1.043	1.050
	(0.021)	(0.020)	(0.072)	(0.091)
High prestige	0.824		0.832	0.733
	(0.528)		(0.458)	(0.539)
Medium prestige	0.865	1.180		0.879
	(0.450)	(0.664)		(0.660)
Low prestige		1.341	1.125
		(0.971)	(0.843)
Trends * High prestige			1.023	1.020
			(0.079)	(0.095)
Trends * Med prestige		0.973		0.992
		(0.074)		(0.098)
Trends * Low prestige		0.978	1.003
		(0.088)	(0.098)
Wald χ²	214.88	231.99	233.05	233.56
Prob > χ²	(0.000)	(0.000)	(0.000)	(0.000)
Failures (Improvement)	58	18	34	6
Ministers	232	232	232	232
Observations	2,088	2,088	2,088	2,088

Notes: The table only shows the results of key independent variables, and for full specifications, see Appendix Table A3. Baseline categories are a low-prestige post in Models 1 and 2, a medium-prestige post in Model 3, and a high-prestige post in Model 4. The unit of analysis is a ministry-month. Robust standard errors in parenthesis.

*p < .10, **p < .05, ***p < .01.

The results of the models in Table 3 confirm our two hypotheses. First, in Model 1, we find that a unit increase in Trends score leads to a 6.5 percent greater possibility of improvement for ministries. Based on the estimates in Model 1, an increase in a minister’s Trends score from its observed mean to two standard deviations above the mean values leads to a hazard rate four times higher overall. The substantive effect is graphically shown on the left panel of Figure 3 (3.1), which displays the average probability of agencies’ performance improvement, conditional on public profiles in general, for each month of the allocation of time in office. Therefore, this finding supports our first hypothesis.

Figure 3.

Agency performance hazard function and ministerial public profiles.Notes: Figures 3.1-3.2 are based on the estimation of models 1-2 of Table 3, respectively. Given a heavily left-skewed distribution of Trends scores, we present substantive effects of their increase from observed minimum to two standard deviations above the mean values.

Consider Oh Myung, who led the Ministry of Science and Technology from 2003 to 2004, as a notable agency leader. Oh was versatile enough to successfully serve four different presidents as heads of three different ministries. His successful career as a government official was largely due to his personality and leadership. As a transformational type of leader who was able to communicate a vision of the organization’s future, Oh was respected by both government officials and ordinary citizens.¹⁵ His positive reputation and publicity induced favorable media coverage, which helped to bring attention to his ambitious agenda. Although he led the Ministry of Information and Communication, his major initiative to develop a digital electronic switching system, which initially was not budgeted for in the government, was able to attract financial support from four electronics firms, including Samsung and LG, thanks to his reputation and leadership.¹⁶ The government-led agenda initiated by him paved the way for the country to become a powerhouse in the information technology industry.

Second, in Model 2 of Table 3, we also find that a unit increase in Trends score leads to a 7.3 percent greater possibility of improvement for high-prestige ministries. Based on the estimates in Model 2, an increase in a minister’s Trends score from its observed mean to two standard deviations above the mean values leads to a hazard rate 4.2 times higher in high-prestige ministerial posts. On the right panel of Figure 3 (3.2), we display a graph showing the average probability of agencies’ performance improvement, conditional on public profiles and ministry types (high-prestige posts specifically), for each month of the allocation of time in office. On the other hand, the variable for ministers’ public profiles is not statistically significant in Models 3 and 4 of Table 3.

In sum, the magnitude of the hazard rates in Models 2–4 indicates that ministers with higher public profiles are more likely to win improvement of agency performance, particularly in higher-prestige posts. This confirms our second hypothesis that public profiles have no significant impact on the improvement probability of an agency’s performance in lower-prestige posts.

Consider Yoon Jeung-hyun, who led the Ministry of Strategy and Finance, one of the key cabinet posts, between 2009 and 2011. Facing the 2009 economic crisis, his forward-thinking approach and charismatic addresses appeared in all major media in the country. As a result, this induced the National Assembly to give strong support to his expansionary fiscal policy based on increased government spending. His active policy not only stabilized the national economy but also led to impressive economic growth (6.5% GDP growth in 2010) amid a global slowdown in 2008 and 2009.¹⁷ Overall, the ministry’s performance improved consistently for over two years during Yoon’s tenure.

Regarding our control variables, we further find that a minister’s biographical and contextual features matter in agency performance (see Appendix Table A3). First, a minister’s age has a negative impact on the improvement chance of an agency’s performance. Based on the estimation of Model 1 of Appendix Table A3, an increase in a minister’s age by three years reduces the chance of improvement by 31 percent. Second, ministries led by female ministers are less likely to experience performance improvement than agencies headed by male ministers. Based on Model 1, female-led ministries have a hazard rate 12.8 times lower than male-led ones. These findings provide interesting insights into the relationship between ministers’ individual characteristics and their agencies’ performance, which is worth further investigation as future research agenda.

In addition, we also have interesting findings concerning political contexts surrounding government agencies. We find that agencies have a higher hazard rate (i.e., probability of improvement), (1) when their ministers are appointed at the beginning of the president’s term than later; (2) when their ministers’ tenure ends at the time of a government termination than when the agency heads are replaced between government terminations. Existing research on ministerial appointments and dismissals suggests that contextual factors strongly shape such decisions by chief executives (Lee, 2018a; Lee & Magyar, 2022), which in turn may affect the performance of government agencies. The findings concerning minister replacement and government termination also indicate that a large number of ministers tend to lose their posts in the middle of the chief executive’s term, and given performance gaps in agencies headed by such ministers vis-à-vis those who finish their term with the government, the nature of government and minister terminations should be different (Lee & Schuler, 2020).

Robustness

For robustness, we first estimate agency performance using linear models with a lagged dependent variable. Given that the original value of agency performance is recorded as continuous, ranging from 1 to 4, the choice of linear models is better justified. In particular, we adopt a lagged dependent variable approach to estimate the effect of a minister’s public profile on performance improvement, that is, whether an agency’s performance in one year improved or not, compared to that in the previous year. For this analysis, we first average public profiles, which vary monthly, at a ministry-year level and then estimate their impact on an annual performance of agencies. We report the results of our key independent variables in Table 4 and those of full model specifications in Appendix Table A4. The results from our alternative model specifications show that the coefficients on Trends score are positive and statistically significant in Models 1–2, but the variable does not attain statistical significance in Models 3–4.

Table 4.

The Determinants of Agency Performance: Linear Models with Lagged DV.

	(1)	(2)	(3)	(4)
	General	High-prestige	Med-prestige	Low-prestige
Trends score	0.006***	0.002**	0.027	0.016
	(0.002)	(0.001)	(0.017)	(0.022)
High prestige	0.117		−0.120	0.203
	(0.156)		(0.154)	(0.202)
Medium prestige	0.165	0.120		0.323*
	(0.130)	(0.154)		(0.186)
Low prestige		1.341	1.125
		(0.971)	(0.843)
Trends * High prestige			1.023	1.020
			(0.079)	(0.095)
Trends * Med prestige		0.973		0.992
		(0.074)		(0.098)
Trends * Low prestige		0.978	1.003
		(0.088)	(0.098)
Agency Performance _t−1	0.068	0.056	0.056	0.056
	(0.095)	(0.096)	(0.096)	(0.096)
Observations	173	173	173	173

Notes: The table only shows the results of key independent variables, and for full specifications, see Appendix Table A4. Baseline categories are a low-prestige post in Models 1 and 2, a medium-prestige post in Model 3, and a high-prestige post in Model 4. The unit of analysis is a ministry-year. Robust standard errors in parenthesis.

*p < .10, **p < .05, ***p < .01.

In Table 5, we further test whether public profiles help to not just improve but also maintain the annual performance of agencies. We therefore run a logistic analysis with a dichotomous dependent variable (1 if agencies improved or maintained performance, and 0 if agencies showed worse performance). We report the results of our key independent variables in Table 5 and those of full model specifications in Appendix Table A5. The results in Table 5 show that the coefficients on Trends score are positive and statistically significant only in Models 1–2.

Table 5.

The Determinants of Agency Performance: Logistic Analysis.

	(1)	(2)	(3)	(4)
	General	High-prestige	Med-prestige	Low-prestige
Trends score	0.070**	0.046**	0.015	0.010
	(0.030)	(0.020)	(0.011)	(0.015)
High prestige	0.018		0.518	0.227
	(0.744)		(0.670)	(0.938)
Medium prestige	0.235	0.517		0.745
	(0.624)	(0.670)		(0.865)
Low prestige		0.227	0.745
		(0.937)	(0.865)
Trends * High prestige			0.099	0.036
			(1.136)	(0.168)
Trends * Med prestige		0.099		0.135
		(0.136)		(0.173)
Trends * Low prestige		0.036	0.135
		(0.168)	(0.173)
Observations	173	173	173	173

Notes: The table only shows the results of key independent variables, and for full specifications, see Appendix Table A5. Baseline categories are a low-prestige post in Models 1 and 2, a medium-prestige post in Model 3, and a high-prestige post in Model 4. The unit of analysis is a ministry-year. Robust standard errors in parenthesis.

*p < .10, **p < .05, ***p < .01.

Finally, in Table 6, we show that our results are robust to the alternative classification of portfolios. Past research attempted to classify ministries according to whether the ministries need to appeal to the ruling party (Lee & Park, 2020) or are affiliated with the president’s agenda (Park et al., 2021) due to their subject matter. Building on the former, we reclassify our ministries and check whether those that require political appeal derive benefit from agency heads with greater public profiles regarding their performance, compared to those not requiring such appeal (i.e., nonpolitical agencies). The results show that this indeed seems to be the case, as the Trends score is positive and statistically significant.

Table 6.

The Determinants of Agency Performance: Cox Models with Alternative Classification of Portfolios.

	(1)
	Political-appealing
Trends score	1.055***
	(0.027)
Non-political	1.244
	(0.899)
Trends * Non-political	0.922
	(0.077)
Observations	2,088

Notes: The unit of analysis is a ministry-month. Robust standard errors in parenthesis. *p < .10, **p < .05, ***p < .01.

Discussion and Conclusion

In this article, we seek to broaden our understanding of how ministers’ leadership skills affect agency performance by focusing on ministers’ public profiles. For this analysis, we not only constructed an original measure of a public profile based on Google Trends searches but also adopted the unique data on annual agency evaluations from the independent assessment committee in South Korea. Returning to our theory, the results suggest that ministers’ public profiles are important for agency performance. Our analysis shows that a minister’s high public profile is an advantage,¹⁸ particularly in more salient policy areas, such as finance, foreign affairs, and national security, where their skills of directly appealing to the public can be more effective.¹⁹ Nevertheless, we recognize that ours is a potentially narrow operationalization of particular leadership abilities. Indeed, agency heads may be able to attract resources and garner bureaucrats’ respect in ways that do not attract public attention. In spite of being challenging to measure, future work could evaluate how these less public forms of leadership skills affect performance prospects, not to mention the types of statements from the ministers, as to how they speak also matters.

Our analysis makes clear contributions to the literature on the role of ministers in bureaucratic performance. First, we make a theoretical contribution by demonstrating that ministers’ public profiles are important for agency performance, because of their functioning as an indirect mechanism of accountability and their influence over lawmakers and bureaucrats in the political process. Second, we also make an empirical contribution by providing new measures of public profiles and agency performance that are robust to issues concerning existing perceptual measures. That these measures are easily applicable to other research is the strength of our empirical approach, we believe.

Will this theory generalize to other contexts or countries? Given evidence from other mature democracies outside of Korea, such as the United States, we think so. As in the cases of Ray LaHood, the former U.S. Secretary of Transportation who created significant mass media interest by pushing his policy of banning texting while driving,²⁰ and Jane Garvey, the former Administrator of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration who gained nationwide attention for her promise to the public regarding the safety of air travel,²¹ leaders who are adept at attracting external support can capture the attention and enthusiasm of the public as well as of agency managers and employees (Balla & Gormley, 2017, pp. 283–284). Indeed, research on ministers and policymaking in Europe also demonstrates that ministers’ leadership skills in creating name recognition can help to generate support for policies or lead to policy change (Andeweg, 2000).

What implications does our analysis have for democratic governments? Although ministers are not directly chosen by citizens but by elected political leaders, the importance of their abilities to extract public support for bureaucratic performance has significant implications for the legitimacy and accountability of democratic governments. Although we should be cautious of the potential negative effects of high public profiles, as in the cases of rabble-rousers such as Donald Trump who might spark a countervailing base of opposition or polarization, such leadership skills can facilitate advancing new policies or engaging with the public. As in some nondemocratic governments where only colorless technocrats are chosen for key policy positions, if ministers who are able to attract public attention are consistently sidelined, citizens might stop caring about government policies over time, which leaves the government out of touch. In this regard, we leave the question of the long-term effects of high- versus low-profile governments as a main item on the future research agenda.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-arp-10.1177_02750740221098035 - Supplemental material for Agency Heads’ Public Profiles and Bureaucratic Performance

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-arp-10.1177_02750740221098035 for Agency Heads’ Public Profiles and Bureaucratic Performance by Don S. Lee in The American Review of Public Administration

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 has been supported by the Ministry of Education of Republic of Korea and National Research Foundation of Korea (BK21FOUR Toward Empathic Innovation: Through Platform Governance Education & Research Programs), (grant number 4199990114294).

ORCID iD

Don S. Lee

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

Author Biography

Don S. Lee is an assistant professor at the School of Governance and Department of Public Administration, Sungkyunkwan University. His research has been introduced in the Washington Post and the Economist.

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