Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This paper analyzes how a network position of each local government head affects a different policy adoption in the phase of heteromorphic diffusion. Citizen Participatory Budgeting System, originated from Porto Alegre's experience in Brazil, has been widely adopted throughout the world, being seen as an effective way to improve the democratic responsiveness for citizens and transparency of the government. Likewise, in the case of South Korea, the reformist Roh administration recommended, in 2004, the introduction of the new system for each local government in order to enhance the transparency of the local budget process and allow local people to participate into public affairs actively.

At this point, it is quite unique that a pattern of policy diffusion of the Citizen Participatory Budgeting System in South Korea. Just before the amendment of the Local Finance Act in 2011, which to oblige for all local governments to adopt the system, the central government proposed 3 types of standardized forms constituting different level of institutionalization to guarantee citizen participation for each other, and local governments could select one of them autonomously.

Since then, the heteromorphic diffusion of the Citizen Participatory Budgeting System has occurred with different levels of institutionalization by which each local government head chose. The existing literatures on the unique diffusion of policy in South Korea have analyzed that the ideological orientation of the local government heads, usually divided by dichotomously into the conservative and the reformist, as the primary source for adopting the different policy forms. In other words, according to them, the political affiliation of the heads caused different personal attitudes towards the system since the reformist administration initiated it.

However, the previous studies show a significant limitation by focusing only on the ideological orientation of the local government heads, which is a kind of personal attributes; that is, they overlook the relational nature inherent in the policy diffusion. By inviting the network analysis, the present paper demonstrates a mechanism of how different relational characteristics of the local government heads in the inter-governmental network structure interact with personal political orientations, for the adoption of the differently institutionalized Citizen Participatory Budgeting System. For this purpose, the author constructs a unique network dataset of local government heads in South Korea to show the interaction empirically. The paper has its own implication by shedding light on the link between social network analysis and policy diffusion, which has not been studied sufficiently.