Albany, NY:SUNY Press, 2016. xi, 211 pp. US$85.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-4384-6251-6.
A comparative study requires additional investment in collecting data and identifying a proper analytical framework. The cost might be higher when we compare political systems in different cultural areas. However, this book provides an efficient and effective strategy for this type of research; that is to apply a framework, previously established in the case of the United States, to the case of South Korea, which has been understudied in comparative works. Hence, the book spends much time explaining politics in South Korea in terms of three elements: the relation between state and society, actors across sectors, and the media. Then it compares the case of Korea with the case of the United States, where the original framework was developed. Of course, this strategy has a trade-off between theoretical generalizability and specificity of case.
Few studies have been conducted to evaluate similarities and differences in elements of the policy process and its outcome between Western and non-Western countries. This book has intellectual merits because of its original way of comparing two culturally different political systems.
This book is guided by four questions, which attempt to discover the principal characteristics of politics surrounding policy outputs in South Korea. The first question is, who dominates the politics surrounding policy making in South Korea? The author draws conclusions by evaluating three stages of the policy process: agenda setting, providing policy alternatives, and policy decisions. The president and the legislature are the important actors in the first stage, agenda setting. For the second stage, however, legislators are less capable of offering policy alternatives to an established agenda than are bureaucratic agencies. For the third stage, the decision-making power converges in the state bureaucracy and the political party, which has control of each policy agenda.
The second question is, how does the legacy of the state-society relationship shape the mobilization and influence of nongovernmental interests in policymaking? The author concludes that a large portion of Korean civil society has evolved through a history of confrontation with military dictatorships; this leads to politically biased interactions between civil society and the governmental sector, narrow public support for civil society, and civil society’s limited ability to influence the policy process.
The third question is, how does news—the medium through which the public learns about the policy community—promote or hinder the degree to which policy actors inside and outside the government engage in public policy debates? The author reports that the media mainly pays attention to what governmental actors do. Consequently, this concentration is closely associated with the weak capacity of legislators and nongovernmental groups to influence the policy process.
The fourth question is, how do institutional differences between Korea and the United States shape policy advocacy patterns in these two countries? To answer this question, the author compared the relations between characteristics of the policy actor group and the policy outcomes of both countries. The author concludes that both countries have a common trend, which is summarized as the growing participation of nongovernmental actors in the policy process. While Korean policy actor groups who challenge the status quo are more likely to reflect their policy goals, policy change occurs less frequently in the United States.
Notwithstanding succinct comparison, this book faces challenges that are common in comparative public policy research. For example, one finding of this book is that policy actors of Korea and the United States differ by advocacy strategy, meaning a centralized advocacy strategy within a narrow range in Korea and diverse strategies in the United States. However, I question whether the typology of advocacy strategy in this book can be used for general concepts regarding advocacy across countries. The author classifies the advocacy strategy into three types of lobbying, but additional and careful in-depth discussion is required to see whether the concept of lobbying can extend to the policy process of Korea, where lobbying is less institutionalized and consequently less-developed than in the United States.
Additionally, this book faces challenges regarding data collection. It specifies that its method of data collection is the same as in a previous study of the policy process of the United States. This approach has merits in clearly comparing the policy process of different political systems with a common framework. However, replicating a previous study risks losing specificity of contexts, especially if the theoretical framework was unilaterally developed from case studies of a specific side. In the predictive models of the advocacy success of policy advocacy groups, the model fit of the Korean case was too low to convince readers of the results. The possibilities of policy change by another source, which is external to each policy community side, implies that several important variables might be omitted to explain policy change by policy advocacies. Hence, this book should have discussed what specific drivers of policy change could be omitted when this comparative work resorts to conceptual straining.
Finally, the book could have escaped a theoretical silo had it attempted to connect its findings to more policy process theories. Although this book partially borrows its conceptualization and framework from policy process theories, such as the multiple stream approach and the punctuated equilibrium theory, there are more established and competitive theories of policy process that can explain policy change and could have been employed in this book. For example, the Advocacy Coalition Framework and the Narrative Policy Framework also focus on the strategies of policy actors. A plausible connection is what portion of the behavior of policy actors in this book can be explained by using the two theories.
Kyudong Park
University of Colorado, Denver, USA
pp. 825-827