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ABSTRACT
This study investigates how minority representation affects the trust and perceived legitimacy of the government among the majority. To that end, this article examines the effect of marriage-based immigrant representation in the South Korean government in shaping native Koreans’ perceptions of job performance, trustworthiness, and fairness of the government through the utilization of survey experiment data. The analyses show that a greater representation of the marriage-based immigrant population does not produce positive effects on the native Koreans’ perceptions of the government. This finding indicates that the positive effects of minority representation may come at the expense of the majority’s trust and perceived legitimacy of the government. However, this article argues that representative bureaucracy may be able to reduce reputational damage among the majority by increasing and advertising their organizational competency.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. The South Korean Government has not officially announced statistics with regards to marriage-based immigrant population hiring or placement. However, according to Policy Briefing, a website of the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism and other news articles, it has been observed that the central and local governments started hiring marriage-based immigrant women as public managers since the late 2000s. See http://www.korea.kr/news/reporterView.do?newsId=148711609#reporter.
2. These expectations have been expressed by several top-ranked South Korean public officials in local governments. See http://www.ktv.go.kr/content/view?content_id=390762 as an example.
3. The interviews with marriage-based immigrant public managers are reported in a separate article under review.
4. According to Seol and his colleagues (Citation2005), a majority of foreign women chose to marry abroad due to financial reasons. These foreign women expected reduced financial hardship in South Korea compared to their countries of origin, even though this meant having to marry among the lower economic classes in South Korea.
5. It has been shown that marriage-based immigrants and their children reported that they felt discriminated in their school, workforce, and other communities they belong to. (see National Human Rights Commission Report at https://www.humanrights.go.kr/site/program/board/basicboard/view?&boardtypeid=16¤tpage=11&menuid=001003001004&pagesize=10&boardid=606977). For instance, one marriage-based immigrant woman the researcher met during her field trip in South Korea stated that her children could not interact with their classmates in school just because their mother is a marriage-based immigrant. The experiences of marriage-based immigrant women regarding discrimination are reported in a separate article under review.
6. Local Public Official Acts was enacted in 1963 to establish the basic standard for personnel administration. This Act, particularly Article 25 provides local governments the ground for affirmative action such as hiring immigrant public managers.
7. There has been National Petition regarding this issue. See https://www1.president.go.kr/petitions/183517.
8. The different levels of representation and client evaluation (20% vs. 70%) were chosen using the author’s best judgment to represent the lower and higher level of representation and client evaluation.
9. The survey was written in Korean. The native language of the author is Korean and therefore, she designed and translated the survey experiment with advice from other scholars in South Korea. Furthermore, following the IRB requirements of her institution, she invited a scholar outside her institution who is fully knowledgeable about the language and the subject matter of this study to ensure the accuracy and appropriateness of the survey.
10. For randomization, the researcher used Excel XLMiner tool package to randomly assign each student to four types of surveys.
11. It should be noticed that ) shows that the reported client evaluation does not significantly affect the probability of falling into the moderate categories of job performance. This is due to the mixed processes of lower rating moving into the middle rating and some of the middle ratings moving higher; so the ‘3’ category adds former ‘2’ and loses some to ‘4’. This is common in ordered models with these many categories.
Additional information
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Junghwa Choi
Junghwa Choi is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Oklahoma. Her research focuses on public perceptions and behaviours and their interactions with public and non-profit organizations.