Bureaucratic responsiveness in times of political crisis: The case of presidential impeachment

The question of who controls the bureaucracy has been widely debated in the political science and public administration literatures. However, to whom bureaucrats are responsive and to what extent are relatively unknown, particularly outside the US. To understand how organizational behaviour changes according to external political environments, we leverage a unique setting, that of the 2016 presidential impeachment in South Korea. We analyse original experimental data from more than 1,000 civil servants, gathered as part of a nationally representative survey, in order to estimate the degree to which civil servants chose to incorporate the president's preferences into their policy decisions before and after her impeachment. We find that presidential impeachment has a differential impact on the responsiveness of civil servants across the formal ranks of the personnel, controlling for their political views and several other individual characteristics. While bureaucrats were similarly responsive to the President before impeachment regardless of their grades, senior civil servants were significantly more responsive to the President after impeachment than were lower-ranking bureaucrats. Our study contributes to the literature on organizational theory and public management the evidence that civil servants' attitudes are shaped by the structure of bureaucratic organizations and change with external settings involving elected principals.