Policy education in South Korea and Japan: similar beginnings but different directions?

ABSTRACT

Examining the evolution of public administration and policy education in South Korea and Japan, this study analyzes how such education in the two countries has developed in response to social needs as well as socioeconomic and political changes. In both South Korea and Japan, public administration and policy education originated as a type of law education, but policy education in Korea has developed as a subdiscipline of social science that focuses on improving the ability of social problem-solving, while policy education in Japan evolved under the umbrella of law education longer than Korea and focuses mainly on training elite bureaucrats with a high level of management ability and capacity. The results of this diachronic comparative study of professional and institutional development as well as academic characteristics (i.e., curriculum and students) indicate that different political and social environments as well as educational backgrounds of faculty members have been primary drivers of the divergence of policy education in the two countries.

KEYWORDS:

• Policy education
• developmental state
• South Korea
• Japan

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The term ‘public policy’ is used as a broader term by including related academic programs representing government, governance, public policy, and public administration at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Please note that most related programs in Korea are traditionally named ‘public administration’, while those in Japan are named ‘public policy’ or ‘public administration’. Unlike in the United States, where policy education often targets professional and graduate students (Perry & Mee, 2022), policy education in Asia, particularly in Korea and Japan, targets both undergraduate and graduate students. In fact, policy (public administration) education initially focused primarily on undergraduate programs and then gradually expanded to the graduate level. We often use the term ‘public administration’ instead of ‘public policy’, particularly for education in the early stages, because ‘public administration’ has been used more widely than ‘public policy’ for academic units in both countries. Contrastingly,the number of stand-alone academic units of public policy has been gradually increasing in the U.S. (Perry & Mee, 2022).

2. In the field of social sciences, it is common to distinguish stages of development such as stage models for economic growth and e-government development. In The Stages of Economic Growth, for instance, Rostow (1960) categorized five stages of economic growth; traditional society, preconditions to take-off, take-off, drive to maturity, and high mass consumption. All of these models have in common that they capture the development of social phenomena interacting with the external environment. Concerning e-government development, the United Nations distinguished five different stages: emerging, enhanced, interactive, transactional, and connected. Because of the different natures and developmental paths of public policy education in the two countries, four different stages (emergence, growth, expansion, and maturity) are identified for Korea, while three stages (emergence, growth, and maturity) are identified for Japan. The era was basically divided on the basis of major events such as World War II, the Cold War, and the Post-Cold War, which affects not only domestic socioeconomic conditions but also the international relations of the two countries and their histories.

3. According to UNESCO-UNEVOC (1995, p113), 1) policies, 2) students, 3) staff, and 4) resources (physical resources, funds, and teaching-learning resources) are the components of the educational system. We first narrowed down staff to academic professionals because academic professionals are the ones who have the authority to decide the curriculum. We also merged policies and resources as institutional developments to understand institutional changes comprehensively.

4. The real-name financial system was adopted to prohibit financial transactions under a pseudonym to reduce various types of corruption and crime. As the real-name financial system started in the early 1990s, financial institutions could only initiate financial transactions after verifying the real names.

5. To analyse the academic background of professionals and curricula, we collected data from Seoul National, Yonsei, Korea, and Sungkyunkwan Universities. Although public administration and policy education in Korea first started at various universities, as mentioned, only these four universities collected and published data on the curriculum from the mid 20^th century. For this reason, we focused mainly on Seoul National, Yonsei, Korea, and Sungkyunkwan Universities. These four schools are the most famous universities in Korea. This may be seen as a weakening of representativeness, but the professors appointed to these schools led the academic world based on the latest public administration knowledge learned in the United States at the time. In this respect, there is also the advantage of being able to more closely examine the education flow in the early stages.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea [NRF-2021S1A03065493].