Policy processes in South Korea through the lens of the Advocacy Coalition Framework

ABSTRACT

The central challenge in advancing the study of public policy is developing portable approaches that capture the specificity of a particular context while also identifying generalities. This article explores the portability of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) to South Korea. The arguments are drawn from a comprehensive review of 67 peer-reviewed applications of the ACF in South Korea from 2002 through 2014 that were written in English and Korean languages. These applications of the ACF show usefulness but not without some reservations about its applicability and its capacity to generate original insights about the South Korean policy processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Policy processes
• Korean politics
• comparative public policy
• public policy
• policy change

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This article provides an abbreviated summary of the ACF, for detailed descriptions see Jenkins-Smith et al. (2014).

2. A policy subsystem is defined by an issue area, a territorial scope and a set of policy actors. Policy actors are defined as the people actively involved in a policy subsystem.

3. This section provides a sufficiently brief summary of South Korean government. It is not a comprehensive. For more detailed descriptions see Kwon and Koo (2014).

4. For example, we found that the differing views between coders on the same article were likely to take place when the article failed to provide concrete explanation through variables in describing the pathways to policy change. In such situations, the human coders initially differed in extracting the explanations for change.

5. A count of ACF applications in the United States puts the total at 32 from 2009 through 2014 compared to 52 in South Korea over the same time period. The search for U.S. applications was conducted on Google Scholar using the term ‘advocacy coalition framework’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sojin Jang

Sojin Jang is currently a PhD candidate at University of Colorado-Denver. Her current research interests include climate change, disaster management and policy process theories.

Christopher M. Weible

Christopher M. Weible is Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Workshop on Policy Process Research at the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado Denver. His research focuses on advancing policy theories. He has topical expertise in politics involving energy, food and water systems.

Kyudong Park

Kyudong Park is a PhD student at University of Colorado in Denver, USA. His current research interests are policy process, network analysis and institutionalism.