The Experience of Active Representation in South Korea: How Marriage-Based Immigrant Public Servants Represent Their Clients

Abstract

A long research tradition has argued that representative public servants regularly advocate for the interests of clients like themselves—whether similarity is based on race, ethnicity, or gender. This article broadens the representative bureaucracy literature to explore a different basis for advocacy (marriage-based immigrant status) using unique qualitative data. To explore the experience of representation from the perspective of public servants, we conducted semi-structured interviews with marriage-based immigrant public servants in South Korea in 2017. Our results indicate that while marriage-based immigrant public servants actively attempt to address the needs of the marriage-based immigrant population, advocacy is often a learned behavior rather than the reason public servants sought their positions. It is also observed that their efforts to represent the marriage-based immigrant population are heavily limited by institutional factors of South Korea such as insecure job status and the lack of a critical mass of marriage-based immigrant public servants.