Presidential appointments of ministers in South Korea: beyond the dichotomy of loyalty and competence

Abstract

ABSTRACT The present study provides an overview of the history of the civil service in South Korea, focusing on political appointments at the upper levels of the bureaucracy. We limit our investigation’s scope to presidential appointments of ministers and underscore the necessity for additional scholarly attention to this subject. To empirically assess these appointments, we introduce a novel dataset and conduct an analysis that examines the demographic characteristics and career paths of past ministers, alongside the types of political patronage employed in their appointments. This analysis utilizes the analytical framework of loyalty versus competence as proposed by (Ouyang, Y., Haglund, E. T., & Waterman, R. W. (2017). The missing element: Examining the loyalty-competence nexus in presidential appointments. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 47(1), 62–91.) and the typology of patronage outlined by (Panizza, F., Peters, B. G., & Ramos Larraburu, C. R. (2019). Roles, trust and skills: A typology of patronage appointments. Public Administration, 97(1), 147–161), which is further elaborated by (Peters, B. G. (2023). Patronage in Asian political systems: A framework for research. In B. G. Peters, C. Knox, & B. Kim (Eds.), Political patronage in Asian bureaucracies (pp. 1–21). Cambridge University Press). Our findings reveal that, irrespective of the regime or ministry, programmatic technocrats are the most prevalent type of presidential appointee in South Korea, with nearly half being former bureaucrats. Although most ministers in South Korea align with this category, we also discern significant variations across different regimes and ministries. These findings provide insights into the practices of political appointments in South Korea’s civil service and contribute to the literature on public administration and governance.