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

• Author: Soonae Park,Don S. Lee
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129211053625
• Published date: 01 December 2022
• Date: 01 December 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2022, Vol. 75(4) 1186–1200

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129211053625

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Political Crisis in Central Government and

Bureaucrats’Responses in Provincial

Government: The Impact of Governors’

Characteristics

Soonae Park

1

and Don S. Lee

2



Abstract

Scholars have debated the question of what inf‌luences bureaucrats’policy implementation in provincial government,

some taking the top-down and some the bottom-up approaches. However, less well understood in this debate is the

impact of governors’characteristics, particularly at a time of national political crisis. Given that their roles have been

proven important for the performance of provincial governments, this is a signif‌icant oversight. To f‌ill this gap, we

examine the effect of governors’political characteristics on provincial bureaucrats’responses to the center by leveraging

a unique setting, that of presidential impeachment in South Korea. Using original survey data on 655 civil servants from all

17 provincial governments, gathered as part of a representative survey, we f‌ind that bureaucrats are less responsive to

the central government after impeachment. Our results show that this difference between pre- and post-impeachment is

driven by several political characteristics, such as governors’political ideology and tenure in off‌ice. Our f‌indings have

implications for the role of governors in intergovernmental relations and the management of provincial governments ’

performance.

Keywords

political crisis, governors, bureaucratic response, experiment, South Korea

In the f‌ield of intergovernmental relations, there have been

debates over the effectiveness of centralized control.

1

One

typical viewpoint is that, given the hierarchical nature of

the relationship, the central government is able to induce

lower-level governments to respond to its instruments of

control (Chubb 1985;Wood 1991). Often, the national

government can leverage its f‌inancial or legal superiority

over its provincial counterpart to force its preferred policy

to be implemented at the lower level. However, there has

been growing research examining the role of local actors

in the intergovernmental relationship. These scholars il-

luminate the centrality of local factors and circumstances

in determining the effectiveness of central direction over

local governance (Hedge and Scicchitano 1994;Riccucci

2005;Scholz, Twombly, and Headrick 1991;Whitford

2007;Wood 1992).

While existing studies contribute knowledge about di-

verse control mechanisms from the center and the role of

local factors in intergovernmental relations (Miller 1992;

Moe 1985;Romzek 1990;Wood 1988), there is little re-

search investigating the impact of provincialgovernments’

political leadership. Much of political science research

tends to focus on governors’behavior and electoral ac-

countabilityin the citizen-politician linkage (Alt,Bueno de

Mesquita, and Rose 2011;Ferraz and Finan 2011)rather

than their behavior and responses in the central-local

government linkage. In this article, we f‌ill this gap by

examining the impact of governors’characteristics on

centralized control over lower-level governments through

the lenses of bureaucrats in provincial governments, par-

ticularly in the context of national political crisis. Specif-

ically, we look into the three political characteristics of

governors as elected politicians, that should be closely

1

Graduate School of Public Administration, Seoul National University,

Korea

2

Graduate School of Governance and Department of Public

Administration, Sung Kyun Kwan University, Korea

Corresponding Author:

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

Administration, Sung Kyun Kwan University, Korea.

Email: don.lee@g.skku.edu