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Abstract Does female bureaucratic support for female political leaders change over time? Existing research focuses on factors that vary across countries. Little work examines how contingent events within a context [...]

For outsiders to higher education institutions (HEIs) in South Korea, predicting the outcomes of the International Education Quality Assurance System (IEQAS)--a Korean institutional accreditation system for HEIs--is challenging. The annual IEQAS accreditation has been conducted behind closed doors; the assessment process is confidential, and there is little access to the data for the public and individuals. However, many stakeholders, such as overseas applicants to Korean HEIs, may want to predict whether particular universities will pass the upcoming IEQAS. Hence, we sought an alternative method for the outsiders to predict a binary result of the IEQAS accreditation by utilizing disclosure data that the Korean government has published. To best predict the outcomes, we mapped out a threefold discrete model combining logistic regression, discriminant analysis, and neural network. We collected the information disclosed by the Ministry of Education in 2019 on 138 Korean private HEIs and then analyzed the secondary public dataset in line with the discrete method that ensures generalizability. Results showed: (1) three education investment factors, and one school operations factor appeared as key predictors among the tested indices; (2) education cost per student within education investment proved to be the most crucial element; and (3) while leveraging the disclosed data turned out to be reliable, neural network's predictive accuracy was higher than those reported using logistic regression and discriminant analysis. By processing the publicly available disclosure data, our self-study model may effectively assist in predicting IEQAS outcomes, and it can also be used as a diagnostic, prior to accreditation, by local HEIs in other nations to check their preparedness and likelihood of success within similar contexts.

How do bureaucrats respond to legislators' demands for change in policy implementation? We distinguish between unified and divided government, where the degree of legislative oversight over bureaucratic autonomy is likely to differ, and we argue that how bureaucrats actually respond in varying executive‐legislative relations depends on their incentives shaped by greater autonomy in implementation (unified government) versus closer monitoring by legislators (divided government). Analyzing two sets of original data from list and endorsement experiments with local bureaucrats in Korea (n = 4064)—one from the period of legislative auditing and the other from the nonauditing period—we find that bureaucrats are more likely to incorporate legislators' views into their decision‐making under unified than under divided government. Furthermore, bureaucrats are more responsive to legislatures when their political ideology is congruent with that of a legislative majority than when it is incongruent, regardless of unified or divided government. Our findings have a clear implication: the importance of bureaucratic autonomy and preferences rather than monitoring as an effective tool to increase bureaucratic responsiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public administration and political science researchers have debated what constitutes effective ministerial leadership in presidential governments. Some argue that, looking at it from the chief executive's perspective, ministers ought to be capable of supporting her policy programs, but others, taking the bureaucrats' point of view, contend that ministers need to be experienced in managing agencies and executing policy correctly. However, there has been a lack of research on the public assessments of ministerial leadership, particularly in times of crisis. We contribute experimental evidence by analyzing original survey data on more than 1200 South Korean citizens collected during the COVID‐19 pandemic. We find that, overall, citizens are more likely to endorse ministers' technical expertise and management abilities than their political skills during a crisis. Moreover, as the impact of a national crisis becomes more severe, the levels of support enjoyed by ministers with technical expertise increase more than the support given to ministers with other skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]