Bureaucratic Power,Information Disclosure And Government Integrity

South Korea has been constantly developing its anti-corruption reforms,among which includes the requirement of government agencies to actively and moreover,extensively operate an aggressive information disclosure system in order to combat and prevent corruption.Nonetheless,the level of corruption in Korea tends to be quite severe compared to the level of the adjective economy.In particular,government agencies considered by people to have huge powers are often involved in corruption cases,and corruption by central government officials are the most serious ones.The purpose of this study is to empirically identify the effects of bureaucratic power and information disclosure on integrity,based on the specific social situation in Korea.This study focused on the principal-agent theory.Citizens commit power to the government,and again the government entrust it to its officials.The complexity of this relationship of power can be a source of corruption.Meanwhile,such a principal-agent relationship could cause information asymmetry,which is likely to cause moral hazard.Based on these theoretical foundations,this study has examined previous studies on power,integrity and information disclosure.A lot of scholars believe the power of government agencies influences integrity,but opinions were divided on whether information disclosure helps improving integrity or not.After examining theoretical foundation above and previous studies,this study designed a model which sets bureaucratic power as an independent variable,degree of information disclosure as a regulatory variable and government integrity as a dependent variable.The research hypothesis is as follows.First,the greater the bureaucratic power is,the lower the degree of integrity would be,and the two will have a negative correlation.Second,the higher the degree of information disclosure,the higher the degree of integrity and the two will have a positive correlation.Third,the degree of information disclosure will have a positive effect on the impact of bureaucratic power on integrity.This study used statistical data of previous study which quantified the relative power of the Korean central government agencies and the annual report on information disclosure.The time frame of this study is the tenure of President Lee Myung-Bak(2008-2012)and President Park Geun–Hye(2013-2017).The analysis of correlations,hierarchical regression,and multiple regression were conducted on the 374 samples of the central government agencies that could secure all of the power index,information disclosure,and integrity data.This study considers that government agencies during the Lee Myung-Bak and Park Geun-Hye Administrations were different from each other,since in some cases names and functions of agencies were similar,but in many other cases it was difficult to see them as the same due to the organizational reforms and occasional organizational reforms in case of incident such as the Sewol Ferry.As a result of analysis,there was a strong negative correlation between power and integrity,and clear positive correlation between information disclosure and integrity.It has also been found that information disclosure has a modulating effect that mitigates the negative effects of power on integrity.In other words,the result of this study which analyzed central administrative agencies in Korea supports all research hypotheses 1,2 and 3.On the other hand,the government size designated as the control variable did not have a significant effect on the integrity,but rather it was found that the type of position and work had a significant effect on integrity.Based on the analysis above,the following policy proposals could be made to improve the integrity of the government.First,organizational reform should be done to lower the level of bureaucratic power.At this time,the nature of the organization,in other words types of position and work,rather than the size of the government,could have a more clear effect on improving integrity.Second,the government should actively disclose information.Information disclosure is one of the fastest means of improving integrity,because it can be done more easily through reorganizing the manual compared to organizational restructuring.Meanwhile,this study has limitations that do not include variables that could affect integrity,such as the difference between the ruling parties of the two governments,the ideology of the leader,and the public perception of corruption in the central government.More detailed policy recommendations are expected,if additional studies in the near future complement the points above and do additional empirical studies on the concept of bureaucratic power.