Does the institution actually change? An exploratory study on policy idea and policy competition

Issue title: Special issue on Evidence-based Government: Secure, Transparent and Responsible Digital Governance

Guest editors: Soon Ae Chun, Nabil R. Adam and Beth Noveck

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Lee, Eunmi | Kim, Dongwook^*

Affiliations: Graduate School of Public Administration, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author: Dongwook Kim, Graduate School of Public Administration, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea. Tel.: +82 2 880 5628; E-mail: dong@snu.ac.kr.

Abstract: This study analyzes the policy changes that take place even when though internal institutions and external environments are stable. It tracks the answer to a couple of questions: Does the content of economic policy direction change every year in a more stable macroeconomic environment? If it changes, how can this be explained by theory? To investigate these changes, Korean annual economic policy direction reports released from the Ministry of the Interior were collected. Through text mining analysis, the words in the reports from over 24 years (from 1993 to 2016) were examined. The analytical results show that policy elites constantly compete to influence the policy by keeping themselves in the past to acquire and maintain legitimate authority while responding to the government’s needs for creative innovation and change.

Keywords: Institution, policy idea, policy competition, text mining

DOI: 10.3233/IP-170060

Journal: Information Polity, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 163-175, 2018