What factors underlie burden tolerance in South Korea? Policy implementation domain, administrative efficiency, and bureaucratic personality

ABSTRACT

Although administrative burden has been studied in relation to social policy, the experience of policy implementation as onerous is relevant to all policy domains, and citizens can experience burden in virtually any encounter with the state. Moreover, perceptions of administrative burden can be influenced by administrative values, such as efficiency. Burden tolerance captures an individual’s belief that the compliance, learning, and psychological costs associated with policy implementation are legitimate and functional, and consequently their willingness to impose these costs on policy targets. We hypothesise that burden tolerance is conditioned by both policy implementation domain and the efficiency of the implementing organisation. Additionally, we link bureaucratic personality, or the tendency to view rules as intrinsically desirable and legitimate, to burden tolerance. We test our hypotheses using a representative sample of South Korean citizens and a survey experiment. Our results suggest that, first and contrary to our expectations, policy domain does not affect burden tolerance. Second, knowledge about inefficiency negatively affects tolerance. Third, bureaucratic personality is positively related to tolerance. We also discuss the contextual aspects of administrative burden, and particularly how the East Asian and Korean policy context may have implications for the generalisability of the administrative burden concept.

KEYWORDS:

• Administrative burden
• burden tolerance
• administrative efficiency
• bureaucratic personality
• South Korea

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. One unique feature of the ideological divide in South Korea lies in its military-geographical specificity: liberals tend to advocate for cooperation with North Korea, while conservatives largely focus on strengthening ties with the United States (The Korea Herald, 2022). Nevertheless, the political ideology of viewing markets and the role of government is similar to that of most democracies, specifically, that liberals are friendlier to social welfare policies.

2. Although we consulted the original scale and concept definition of burden tolerance when creating our own scale, we note here that the phrase “from the applicant’s perspective” was not part of the original scale and may have biased the results of the experiment, perhaps in a significant way. We discuss this possibility in the discussion section of the manuscript following a presentation of the results.

3. CFI = Comparative Fit Index, TLI = Tucker-Lewis Index, RMSEA = Root Mean Square Error of Approximation, and SRMR = Standardized Root Mean Squared Residual. See Cangur and Ercan (2015) and Hu and Bentler (1999).

4. This general point was pointed out to us by an anonymous reviewer of this manuscript.

5. This suggestion was pointed out to us by an anonymous reviewer of this manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

The research for this article is financially supported by the College of Public Policy at Korea University.

Notes on contributors

Jesse W. Campbell

Jesse W. Campbell teaches Public Administration at Incheon National University in South Korea. He is interested in comparative public administration, and specifically in identifying features of the national administrative context that determine the initiation, configuration, and effectiveness of administrative reform. He is also interested in issues with unique relevance to Korean public administration.

Yongjin Ahn

Yongjin Ahn is an assistant professor at the department of public administration at Korea University Sejong Campus. His research focuses on behavioural public administration, bureaucratic politics, and citizen-government relationships. He holds his Ph.D. in Public Policy and Management from the University of Southern California.