Responsive Democracy: Increasing State Accountability in East Asia

7 | Administrative Reform and Public Attitudes toward Democratic Institutions in South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines

7 | Administrative Reform and Public Attitudes toward Democratic Institutions in South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines Administrative procedure acts (APAs) change the decision-making process within bureaucracies, thereby creating new winners and losers in society. To the extent that average citizens are among the winners, one important indirect effect of APA-like laws seems likely to be enhanced public trust and con‹dence in the civil service, the part of government primarily responsible for implementing national policy. As discussed in chapter 1, citizens living near Korea’s proposed Youngwol Dam, who effectively held veto power over the project, had good reason to feel better about the civil service than did their counterparts at Imha, who were forcibly relocated without consultation or redress. If an APA has its intended effect(s), therefore, some change in the level of public trust in the civil service would be expected after the measure’s passage. The level of public trust and con‹dence in the civil service thus serves as an important indicator of the extent to which an APA has opened up the bureaucracy. Con‹dence in the civil service, in turn, is closely related to faith in the nation’s democratic institutions more generally. To the extent that they enhance public trust and con‹dence in the civil service, APAs may also strengthen public con‹dence in democracy.1 To explore this relationship, I turn to regression analysis, investigating trends in Korean, Taiwanese, and Philippine citizens’ attitudes regarding their countries’ democracies in general and bureaucracies in particular. My data are derived from two waves of the World Values Survey (WVS) conducted in Korea in 1990 and 2001 as well as two waves of the Korea Barometer Surveys (KBS) conducted in 1996 and 2001. The ‹rst WVS took place three years after Korea’s ‹rst democratic election and three 118 years prior to passage of the ‹rst of three stages in the Korean APA (KAPA) law, while the second WVS took place three years following implementation of Korea’s ‹nal major APA stage. The ‹rst KBS took place after the passage of the ‹rst KAPA, while the second took place in the same year as the second WVS. Less nuanced data are available for Taiwan prior to and following passage of Taiwan’s APA (TAPA) and for the Philippines from the 1994 and 1996 WVS and from the 2001 East Asia Barometer (EAB) surveys. (To facilitate more ef‹cient comparisons across waves and hypothesis tests, I pool the surveys in my statistical analyses, based on the country case.) I conduct additional analyses regarding trends in attitudes toward the civil service in these two countries based on the limited available data from the WVS and EAB data sets. These data do not allow a direct test of the effects of APA passage on either procedural transparency or public opinion. Consequently, my evidence is suggestive rather than de‹nitive. Nonetheless, comparing public attitudes between these periods reveals a variety of trends that are precisely what one would anticipate if APAs produced just the sorts of transparency -enhancing effects that I have argued follow from their passage. Moreover, employing multiple distinct comparisons across distinct survey instruments and contexts and three different countries enables me to make a stronger, albeit still suggestive, case for my argument than is possible from a single test. The next section outlines my argument about the relationship between administrative procedural reform and public attitudes toward democratic institutions. From this discussion, I derive a series of testable hypotheses. I then discuss my data and methods before presenting the results of a series of statistical investigations testing my hypotheses. I conclude by considering the broader implications of my ‹ndings. Administrative Reform and Public Attitudes toward Democracy Passage of APAs can increase access to bureaucratic policy-making for a broader set of interests, including typical citizens and their representatives . All else being equal, this process should raise the level of public con‹dence in the civil service and perhaps in the nation’s democratic institutions . Beyond its direct effects on a state’s regulatory process, it is dif‹cult directly to measure an APA’s broader effects on democratic politics . However, it is possible to identify secondary implications of the efAdministrative Reform and Public Attitudes | 119 fects of APA passage that are closely related to governmental administrative transparency and, equally important, that are amenable to empirical testing. Such implications can be found in...