Agency Heads’ Public Profiles and Bureaucratic Performance

• Author: Don S. Lee
• Published date: 01 August 2022
• Date: 01 August 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/02750740221098035

Agency Heads’Public Prof‌iles

and Bureaucratic Performance

Don S. Lee

1

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 improvingtheir 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’uncon-

ventional 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 empha-

size the appointees’biographical characteristics that can

shape their leadership skills, such as education, work experi-

ence, 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 unconsid-

ered in existing studies is how the appointees’public

persona impacts their performance. In charge of administer-

ing 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 pro-

f‌iles may play an important role in determining how the min-

istry performs.

1

Thus far, most research on political elites’public pro-

f‌iles has investigated their effect through electoral out-

comes. 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’perfor-

mance. 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 per-

formance of government agencies in South Korea. Of signif‌i-

cance 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 inde-

pendent 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

School of Governance and Department of Public Administration,

Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, South Korea

Corresponding Author:

Don S. Lee, School of Governance and Department of Public

Administration, Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, South Korea.

Email: don.lee@g.skku.edu

Article

American Review of Public Administration

2022, Vol. 52(6) 409–422

© The Author(s) 2022

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/02750740221098035

journals.sagepub.com/home/arp