The driving forces of collective action among policy actors: Value, power, and social capital

Abstract

This study explores the core factors for the policy actors to select their policy partners in the policy processes, focusing on the mechanism underpinning the communication density between policy actors in the networks. For the purpose, this study identifies three major candidate groups: policy actors’ values, policy actors’ power, and social capital between policy actors. Then, with the relational data collected by the survey on the Korean international migration policy processes, we try to find core factors affecting communication density between policy actors. The results show that the most influential factors are found in the group of social capital while the variables around policy actors’ value systems are shown to be statistically insignificant, and that what is more important is not the trust based on receiver’s social reputation but the instant trust created during the policy process. This research also indicates that formal voting power is one of the significant variables in deciding the communication density between policy actors.

Keywords:

• collective action
• policy network
• policy coalition
• social network analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Korean international migration policy-making process can be a good case to study the collective action among policy actors in a policy network in that the case involves a wide range of policy actors, such as political parties, legislative communities, various governmental agencies, interest groups, and academics, as Table 1 shows. Also, the debate around the issue of importing foreign workers evolved for more than 10 years at that time, which is enough time to show the dynamics of collective action.

2. Communication density is a useful tool to measure the strength of collective action. However, considering the risk that the frequency of ordinary conversation is not so much related to the strength of collective action, this study more focuses on ‘confidential’ communication,’ which shows how much confidential or sensitive information the actors share together in the policy process.