This article empirically explores the understanding and changes in the concept of administrative capacity in the Korean context. Despite a universal consensus on its importance, administrative capacity is defined differently by regimes and stakeholders (i.e. in this study: the public, members of the National Assembly, and academia). To improve our understanding of administrative capacity, we collected three types of texts (337 academic papers, 1470 National Assembly minutes, and 3316 newspaper articles from 2000 to 2019) and analyzed the data using topic modeling and text-network analysis methods. The results suggest that although academic articles emphasized leadership, manpower, education, and other policymaking capacities, the National Assembly stressed innovation capacity in solving different policy problems. Finally, the media, assumed to reflect public opinion, emphasized capacities related to national security.

This research undertakes a thorough examination of the phenomenon of passive administration within the framework of established legal and institutional structures. Despite efforts to encourage active administration and accountability among public officials, there remains some ambiguity regarding the effectiveness of current strategies in preventing passive administration. With the aim of presenting a viable alternative, we employ text analysis techniques, such as correlated topic modeling, KR-Wordrank, and community detection analysis, to classify the various types of passive administration as perceived by the public. Through the analysis of civil petitions submitted to the Passive Public Administrative Reporting Center, we identify eight distinct types of passive public administration, which are redefined as inevitable administration, simple civil petitions, red-tape, paper administration, immobility, irresponsibility, half-hearted handling, and organizational interests. We provide a detailed overview of each type, including case reports and potential countermeasures. This study distinguishes itself by defining types of passive public administration from the viewpoint of the general public, who are both the consumers and observers of the administration. This method contributes to the field by presenting a novel perspective and broader framework. Additionally, this study holds methodological significance as it categorizes real-life cases through text analysis and contextualizes them with the results of prior studies.

Although the fiscal expenditure of the local government is closely related to the political situation, current asymmetric flypaper studies took no count on the political aspects of local governments’ strategic responses, focusing only on the inducement effect or replacement effect depending on the fiscal capacity of local governments. This study analyzed the asymmetric effect of subsidy reduction for basic local governments from 2008 to 2019 and found that the political budget cycle affects local governments’ responses. The direction of the effect accords with the theoretical expectations. There was the symmetric effect two years before the election, the replacement effect one year before the election, and the inducement effect on the election year and a year after the election. It implies that local governments take opportunistic measures according to the election cycle in a situation where subsidies are reduced. This study is meaningful in that it revealed the dynamic characteristics of asymmetric effects, using variables that affect the opportunistic behavior of the heads of the local governments, such as the election cycle and the term limits. In addition, this study suggests that there should be a strategy that takes account of the asymmetric effect followed by the subsidy reduction depending on the time before and after the election to control the size of local governments’ fiscal expenditures and improve expenditure efficiency.

Although critical discussions on organizational ambiguity have been actively conducted, existing empirical studies often uniformly presuppose a negative relationship between goal ambiguity and organizational performance. Therefore this study examined all aspects in which goal ambiguity can negatively and positively affect public organizational performance (goal achievement, customer satisfaction) for 25 autonomous districts in Seoul, and explored the possibility of a nonlinear relationship between goal ambiguity and organizational performance by employing regression analysis. As a result mission comprehension ambiguity had a significant negative effect on goal achievement while the relationship between mission ambiguity and customer satisfaction is inverted U-shaped non-linear, with customer satisfaction up to a point, beyond which higher levels of mission ambiguity led to a decrease in customer satisfaction. Priority ambiguity had a significant positive effect on target achievement. This study is significant in expanding the existing narrow perspective on the relationship between goal ambiguity and organizational performance and suggests that the uniqueness of public organizations should be considered when managing organizational performance through goal setting in the public sector. In terms of methodology, this study also proposed a new measurement method to supplement the limitations of existing indicators by using the semantic diversity of organizational official goals as a measure of goal ambiguity.

Traditional Evidence-Based Policy (EBP) has been criticized for its empirical bias, stemming from its overreliance on readily available data to define policy problems. Additionally, there has been a tendency to focus solely on the evidence, without a systematic discussion on how questions should be formulated. This paper aims to address these limitations by proposing a Question-Driven EBP model that prioritizes the identification and systematization of questions. To derive questions systematically, this paper employs various text analysis methods, drawing on diverse sources such as news articles and legislative transcripts. Keywords, themes, and sentences are extracted by considering the context of the texts. Subsequently, the identified questions are restructured to create a question map. This map is subsequently paired with appropriate data and subjected to analysis. The effectiveness of the Question-Driven EBP model is examined through its application in the policy-making process. The importance of questioning has been stressed in policy and administrative studies, yet no clear methods or procedures have been provided for discovering good questions and connecting them to analysis. The significance of this paper lies in its presentation of the Question-Driven EBP model and the verification of its usefulness through a case study on ambient fine particulate matter.

Understanding policy frames is essential to understanding policies with complex contexts, such as employment policies. The frames need to be addressed in the policy agenda process in particular because they contribute to the actors’ awareness of social issues and to prioritizing their interests and goals. This study examines whether texts from various origins and times differently frame employment policy, in which conflicts among stakeholders have appeared to be most fierce. For analysis, we collect text data related to employment from Korea’s central and local newspapers and the National Assembly of Korea and analyze them using topic modeling and network analysis. The result shows that six topics appear in the field of employment policy–internal environment, employment policy, youth employment, external environment, employment conflict, and employment trend. The importance of topics varies according to the forum; the internal environment emerges as the most important topic in central newspapers, whereas youth employment and employment policy are the most important in local newspapers and the National Assembly, respectively. The result also shows that the internal environment topic has been discussed under political frames while the external environment topic is under economic frames. In addition, the National Assembly appears to frame the employment policy topic from the viewpoint of cost, whereas central newspapers frame the same topic from the viewpoint of demand, indicating that employment policy has an attribution to redistribution policy. The different frames of employment-related discussions in the media and the National Assembly can be interpreted as a result of the comprehensive nature of the employment problem. Alternatives without considering the complex context of employment policy are likely to cause the qualitative deterioration of the labor market. Therefore, it is necessary to take into account the various frames of employment policy.

This study analyzed the effect of the types of rental housing on the mental health of public and private housing tenants. Considering the limitations of controlling variables using regression as well as statistical matching methods, we first measured the differences in mental health conditions between the public and private housing tenants without matching covariates and then compared the results with those in using the propensity score matching method. The robustness results are also checked by adopting the differences by type of matching methods: Propensity Score Matching (PSM), Mahalanobis Distance Matching (MDM), and Coarsened Exact Matching (CEM). As a result, the social relationship satisfaction variable turns out to be a stable and vital variable for explaining the variability of mental health regardless of the type of rental housing. Unlike previous studies, the utility bill variable was found to be inconsistent and statistically insignificant. Therefore, economic variables such as utility bills are relatively insignificant compared to social variables. In conclusion, the results show that it is better to weigh the social relationship satisfaction aspect when it comes to implementing public policy on mental health among public housing tenants.