Public Profiles and Government Performance

I am leading this project on comparative regime types in Asia with Paul Schuler. We examine how government ministers' public profiles affect government performance across democracies and autocracies in Asia. We employ Google Trends data from nine countries in Asia to measure ministers’ public profiles and investigate how such information affects important elements related to a government, such as ministerial promotions and agencies' performance. This project has been funded by Asia Research Institute at the University of Nottingham.

1. Ministers’ Public Profiles and Agency Performance (under review)

Do ministers’ public profiles enhance the performance of public agencies? Existing literature on public administration and public management emphasizes the role of public information in performance management. However, whether public attention to agency heads is related to the performance of their agencies is largely understudied. Using a unique dataset of public profiles of ministers in Korea, we predict that ministers' public profiles have a positive relationship with their agencies' performance. Although ministers may not be directly held accountable to the public, high public attention to ministers' activities may function as an indirect mechanism of holding their accountability and increasing their agencies' performance. Our analysis has important implications for public information and government performance in democracy.

2. Testing the "China Model" of Meritocratic Promotions: Do Democracies Reward Less Competent Ministers than Autocracies? (published in Comparative Political Studies)

Proponents of the “China Model” suggest that autocracies, particularly in East Asia, reward competence more than democracies. However, a competing literature argues that autocracies are less likely to reward competence because autocrats fear that competent officials could challenge for power. We argue that autocracies do not fear technical competence; they fear political competence. As such, autocracies may promote ministers with technical competence but punish the politically competent. Democracies, by contrast, place a premium on political competence when deciding whom to promote. We provide the first test of this theory on how ministerial behavior is rewarded using a unique dataset of political performance and promotions in nine East Asian countries. Our findings show that autocracies promote officials with technical competence as long as the ministers limit their political behavior. In democracies, parliamentary and presidential democracies promote those displaying political competence.