4th International Conference on Public Policy (ICPP4) June 26-28, 2019 – Montréal
Panel T05-P01 Session 4
Politics and Public Administration within Core Executives
Title of the paper
How do Media Coverage and Legislators’ Interpellations Influence the Tenure of Political Appointees and the Political-Executive Interactions in Taiwan?
Author(s)
Tong-yi Huang
National Chengchi University
Zong-xian Huang
National Chengchi University
Date of presentation
June 28, 2019
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4th International Conference on Public Policy (ICPP4) June 26-28, 2019 – Montréal
Abstract How to work with media and the Congress is a vital issue for a minister, and if ministers do not deal with those two areas properly, they may lose their positions as minister and result in the discontinuity of the government policies. However, the function of media coverage and the effect of legislators’ interpellation on ministers’ tenure has not yet attracted serious scholarly attention.
To fill this academic void, we examine the relationship between ministers’ tenure and external factors by collecting tenure data of 219 Taiwanese ministers from 2000-2016, media reports and legislators’ interpellations. Cox proportional-hazards regression results show that the number of news reports is negatively related to the tenure of a minister, but the effects of interpellation are less clear and consistent.
Alongside the quantitative analysis, in-depth interviews also demonstrate the importance of a minister maintaining good public relations with the entire political and social ecosystem/sphere. Interview results also focus on possible cooperation between political appointees and bureaucrats.
Keywords: Political Appointees, Media Coverage, Interpellations, Political-Executive Nexus
I. Introduction
Political appointees constitute the core elements of democratic and representative systems. Generally, newcomers lack practical experience and gradually lose leadership authority in the civil service, which can dramatically influence the performance of administrative agencies (Chang et al., 2001). As temporary public managers, political appointees have been described, in a mocking way, as “in and outers”, “birds of passage”, or “Christmas help” (Maranto, R. 2005:2-6). Hence, frequent turnovers of heads of government agencies may disrupt the stability of the bureaucracy and hurt appointees’ relationships with senior executives. These problems also play a crucial role in the effectiveness of governance (Kettl, & Fesler, 2005; Villadsen, 2016).
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Previous research suggest that the tenure of a minister could be influenced by personal, organizational and environmental characteristics. Research also found that the average length of ministers seems to be decreasing slightly over the years in United Kingdom (Cleary, H. & Richard R., 2009). But scholars still do not have full knowledge of what factors could explain the tenure of a minister. Most existing empirical research have focused on personal characteristics such as previous work experience (Petrovsky, etal. 2017) and organizational factors, including department attribute, party rotation and cabinet reshuffle (Dowding & Kang, 1998; Hahm, et al. 2013). Only few scholars such as Ali (2018) pointed out that turnover intent among public sector employees will be influenced by its outside environment, since organizations do not operate independently from its context. In other words, agencies or ministries are nested in the political environment, consisting of entities such as Congress, courts, other agencies and the media. Nevertheless, the function of environmental factors has not yet attracted serious scholarly attention.
Besides the tenure of a minister, environmental factors may also influence the appointee- careerist nexus. A major mission of political appointees is to respond to public demand. Therefore, Resh (2014) outlined that the logic underlying presidents’ appointment is that political appointees can restrict bureaucratic discretion and shape the goal orientation of agencies to achieve presidential policy agenda. Nevertheless, sometimes this rationale of appointment will cause tensions between political appointees and career staffs when it comes to public relation crises or serious conflicts with legislators. While considering the systematic manifold impacts of the environment, a positive interaction between appointees and executives could enhance effectiveness of the organizations.
As a new democracy, the case of Taiwan is a great field for the studying of the effect of environmental factors. First, Taiwan has been transformed from an authoritarian regime to a vibrant democracy since the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) accomplished the first power transfer in 2000. Democratization pushed the government to start considering public opinion much more seriously than before. Additionally, legislative violence events, with “legislators brawling” being an example, occurred most frequently in Taiwan compared to any other country in the world. By brawling on the parliamentary floor, legislators engage in conflicts to try to get the media's attention and cultivate a personal vote to win the election
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(Batto & Weng, 2016). However, the frequent parliamentary brawls have repeatedly jeopardized the process of policy-making and exacerbated the stress of senior executives (Huang, 2018). Most studies regarding Taiwan's development of democracy focused on party politics and general elections (Chao & Myers, 1994), but the manner in which these elements (i.e. the turnover of political appointees) affect governance effectiveness still needs further studies.
To further examine the relationship between political appointees’ tenure and environmental factors, such as media coverage and legislators’ interpellation, this article attempts to use Taiwan’s case to answer two questions: How do environmental factors affect the length of tenure of agency heads? How do these factors shape political-executive interactions?
Following this section, we will first discuss existing evidence on external factors affecting the tenure of ministers. Based on this prior knowledge, we further develop hypotheses about the determinants of the agency heads’ length of tenure. The third section elaborates our data source and statistical methods. The fourth section will report and illustrate our results. Finally, we conclude with the contributions and limitations of this article.
II. Previous Studies on Ministers’ Tenure
Numerous studies addressed the issue of minister’s tenure or the turnover among political appointees (Chang et al., 2001; Cohen, 1986; Petrovsky et al., 2017). Most theories and researches suggest that personal factors are one of most important elements which could be used to predict ministers’ tenure (Fisher, 1987; Hahm et al., 2013). For example, Fisher (1987) used the dataset from the National Academy of Public Administration to analyze the background of political appointees in America. Their research found that most political appointees in the United States were white male, and their age were between 45 and 55 years old. Also, nearly 40 percentage of political appointees graduated from prestigious schools, and a quarter of them graduated from Ivy League schools. Joyce (1990) also used the National Academy of Public Administration dataset to explore which factors could affect the tenure of a political executive, and found that the larger the difference between current salary and salary in the next position, the shorter the tenure. Also, the political executives appointed by Republican administrations tend to have shorter tenure. Hahm et al. (2013) obtained different
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findings by exploring career related, geographical and educational background of political appointees in Korea. Hahm et al. (2013) showed that male ministers tend to have shorter tenures than female ministers due to symbolic appointment, but other factors do not have significant influence.
Apart from demographic factors, previous experience of a minister is also crucial. Taylor-Robinson and Cardona (2007) conducted cross-national studies in four countries of Latin American including Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Costa Rica, and found that more than 67 percent of ministers used to hold positions in relevant departments, which means most ministers were experienced and were senior bureaucrats. Dull et al. (2009) found political officials who had political experience or used to be legislators served longer than non- experienced ones. The research of Petrovsky et al. (2017) also support previous findings, their studies showed that ‘outsiders’ who are recruited from outside the central government face more challenges and more hardship in retaining longer tenures. Also, party identification of a minister is a critical element because ideological differences may provoke policy conflicts and lower the political control of the president (Aberbach & Rockman, 1976). Whether the ministers and president come from the same party is also seen as an indicator in measuring the concept of ‘loyalty’ (Cohen, 1986).
Some studies have focused on different attributes of the departments where political executives serve. For example, Cohen (1986) illustrated the potential conflict between different type of departments, since older departments were built at the behest of well- organized interests, while newer departments tend to be a complicated merchandise of interest groups. Hence, a conflict between different external stakeholders would cause the resignation of ministers. Dull et al. (2009) conducted research on presidentially appointed, senate- confirmed (PAS) data showing political appointees serve longer when they are appointed to a highly independent and professional position, because those positions usually have greater influence. Other studies also provide support to the fact that ministers of professional departments would stay longer (Chang et al., 2001). But results from Wood and Marchbanks (2008), while controlling for other variables such as potential term, did not find the effect exerted by agency type to be significant. Therefore, Wood and Marchbanks (2008) suggests that the ‘potential term’ variable could adequately control for differences in tenure across
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4th International Conference on Public Policy (ICPP4) June 26-28, 2019 – Montréal
different types of departments. As described above, scholars exploring the tenure of political appointees still do not have consistent findings on the influence of organization factors such as the complexity or independence of departments.
To sum up, the effects of demographical factors such as gender, age, race and educational levels are not very solid and have inconsistent influence. Political appointees who have previous experience with government, whether it is in legislative or administrative institutions, could hold on to their position steadier than ‘outsider’ appointees. Third, the effects of organizational factors still need to be further researched, and the categorization of organization complexity and independence could give us great insights when considering the attribute of different departments. Except for personal and organizational factors, how to work with the media and the Congress is another vital issue for political appointees (Maranto, 2005). We will discuss environmental factors, such as media coverage and legislative oversight, in the next section.
III. Media Coverage, Legislative Oversight and Appointees’ Tenure
Due to the development of mass media, political appointees and senior executives need to consider more external issues while implementing policy. Nowadays, most politicians and administrators are supervised in day-to-day life, this is commonly known as the ‘Fishbowl Principle’ (Gendelman et al., 2009). Moreover, mass media constantly construct challenging situations for political appointees during campaign activities. As Garrett et al. (2006) pointed out, bureaucracy bashing from media and legislators may result in low morale within the organization and hamper the working relationship between senior executives and political appointees. Also, media bashing will reduce the political trust of citizens and influence the effectiveness of policy implementation. Wood and Marchbanks (2008) demonstrated that the more difficult the management environment of public administration, the higher the resignation rate of political executives. Dewan and Dowding (2005) also showed that ministerial resignations could increase the popularity of the government, since resignations have been considered as a corrective action for government incompetence and ministers could become the sacrificial lamb when the public sphere is unfriendly toward the government. Hence, how to maintain good relationship with mass media and set up strategies for political
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management is an important task for political appointees (Hart & Wille, 2006; Askim et al., 2017).
There is, however, no robust evidence showing the relationship between media coverage and ministers’ tenure. For a political appointee implementing the agenda of the president, media attention could be a proxy for the broader performance of the ministry, which is easily noticed by the general public. If the outcomes of policy were poor and incurred the criticism from the public, such criticism will have a negative effect on the tenure of the head of the ministry in charge of the policy. For example, some studies showed that media relations are indicators for the evaluation of the ambassador in the United States, since it reflects the ability of information management (Haglund, 2015). However, Petrovsky et al. (2017) also suggested that media coverage could capture features of expansive performance, but found no evidence between the number of reports and ministers’ tenure, in analyses using the duration data of the UK government. Thus, we try to fill this empirical void by hypothesizing when there are a lot of media attention surrounding a minister, the tenure of a minister would become shorter. The expected hypothesis is constructed below:
Hypothesis 1: The larger the number of news reports, the shorter the tenure of a minister
Legislative oversight within Congress would have remarkable influence on presidential appointments before and after the appointment. The legislature could initiate a vetting process for presidential appointment, including suitability checks and security clearances before the approval of a minister has been made (Schwemle, 2010:8-11). After approval has been given, interpellation and questions from legislators would be the most common oversight tool over a minister, during the minister’s service (Korać, 2016). Ministers have to defend their actions on open committee hearings and may shore up the confidence of citizens while selecting high- profile administrators (Pond, 2008). But past research suspects the effectiveness of parliamentary interpellations, for example, Rozenberg and Martin (2011) pointed out that parliamentary questions seldom received full and sincere answers from bureaucrats.
Previous research, which focused on political appointments, usually conceptualize legislative oversight as the conflict between president and Congress. For example, Chang et al. (2001) used DW-NOMINATE scores as an indicator of measuring conflicts between president and Congress. Their research indicates that conflicts would create significant
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negative consequence for a minister’s tenure. However, seldom do researches consider interpellation as pressure on ministers. Many research in management science demonstrate that work stress would increase the intention to resign from the current position. For example, studies showed that high stress careers, such as social workers or healthcare workers, would have a higher risk of burnout and resignation (Kim & Stoner, 2008; Saijo et al., 2018). However, most research regarding political appointees still do not pay much attention to the effect of legislative oversight and interpellation. We argue that interpellation from legislators could become a heavy pressure on political appointees, and researches need to explore the link between interpellation and turnover intention of ministers.
More specifically, we argue that parliamentary questions could be categorized into ‘Committee Interpellation’ and ‘Plenary Interpellation’ due to their distinctive natures. The in-depth and technical debates could take place within committees, but debates within plenary sessions usually focus on problems regarding political appointee’s individual problems rather than specific policy issues (Pelizzo, & Stapenhurst, 2012: 32-36). Therefore, we expect the interpellations within committees to be advantageous for a minister, since they could justify their points of view and seek direct support from legislators in the committee. Conversely, plenary interpellation might be full of bashing and even assaults from legislators, we therefore expect the interpellations within plenary sessions to be harmful to a minister. Hence, we build up hypothesis 2 and 3 below:
Hypotheses 2: The more frequent a minister attends committee interpellation, the longer is his/her tenure.
Hypotheses 3: The more frequent a minister attends plenary interpellation, the shorter is his/her tenure.
IV. Data and Method
This section describes the source of our dataset and the operational definition of variables. We introduce dependent variable first. Second, we divide environmental factors into media coverage and legislators’ interpellation, and illustrate each variable separately. Control variables such as personal and organizational factors are defined and measured in the
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third part. Finally, Figure 1 summarizes the scope of research structure and Table 1 shows the variables included in models and descriptive statistics.
1. Length of Tenure
The duration dataset was collected from the ‘R.O.C. Government Post Database’. The database contains every record of personnel job rotation (over ninety hundred thousand records) in the Taiwanese government since the foundation of the government to date. We calculate total calendar days of each minister from 2000 to 2016 and count the days as the variable Tenure. We omit independent ministries which have fixed terms such as the Central Bank and the Central Election Commission. Two influential observations within our dataset discovered through data pre-processing were also excluded.1 Finally, 219 ministers from 28 ministries in Taiwan’s central government were included.
2. Media Coverage
We use the number of stories on the United Daily News online database (udndata.com) to represent the variable Media Coverage. Among Taiwan’s newspaper databases, the UDN database is the only one which covers our research period from 2000 to 2016. We used the keywords “name of the minister”, “name of the agency”, “name of his/her position” and the period of his/her service as our standard search.
Even though friendly stories in a positive point of view would be beneficial to the tenure of head of agencies, we do not scrutinize the content of the reports. There is a practical reason for ignoring content of reports. If content were to be considered, examining another media source with a different partisan bias from the UDN would be required. As mentioned above, no other online newspaper database covered the entire research period. Apart from this, we standardized the variable by dividing it with the tenure of appointees and made a log transformation to improve the normality of our data before doing further analyses.
1 The major reason of ignoring these observations is that the tenure of them was too short and could be seen as outlier cases. One observation is the former head of the Ministry of Economic Affairs who served for 47 days, and the other is the former head of the Ministry of National Defense who served for only 6 days. 9
4th International Conference on Public Policy (ICPP4) June 26-28, 2019 – Montréal
3. Legislators’ Interpellation
We collected interpellation data from the Legislative Yuan (the highest legislative organization of Taiwan) gazettes to represent the pressure of legislative oversight. Therefore, consistent with Hypotheses 2 and 3, we expect the divergent effects of interpellation within committee and whole chamber. Using the Gazettes Management System constructed by the Legislative Yuan, we counted the number of attendance in committees or plenary interpellation sessions to create two variables - Committee Interpellation and Plenary Interpellation. We also standardized those variables by dividing by the tenure of appointees.
4. Personal and Organizational factors
Both personal and organizational factors are used as control variables in our model. First, we define personal characteristics by gathering demographic data such as Gender, Education Levels, and Age. Also, we included the variable Administrative Experience, which specifies whether appointees had prior executive experience (=1) or had no experience (=0) in central government before they are appointed. Third, we created a dummy variable Party Identification to indicate whether appointees belong to the same party with the president (=1) or not (=0), to measure the ideological differences between political appointees and the president.
Next, we consider organizational factors. For an organizational perspective, we included two variables: Core Ministry and Ministry Complexity. The concept of core ministry is measured by the budget magnitude of the ministry and whether the ministry has statutory qualifications (Chang, 2011; Cronin, 1980: 276-285). Regarding ministry complexity, there are different definitions used by scholars, including the number of executive agencies (Indridason & Kam, 2008) and the number of civil servants (Askim et al. 2017). Nevertheless, we build up the concept of ministry complexity by following the empirical research constructed in Taiwan to fit the local context (Chiu, & Yung-Ming, 2004). Ministries with attributes such as ‘financial and economy’, ‘professional technology’ and ‘national security’ were categorized as ‘highly complex’ (=1) and all the others as ‘slightly complex’ (=0).
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Additionally, to control for the bias of tenure, we followed previous studies (Dull et al., 2009; Wood & Marchbanks, 2008) and counted in reverse order from the last day of an administration to the first as the variable Potential Term.
In sum, Figure 1 shows the research structure of this article and Table 1 summarizes descriptive statistics for all variables within the model. We find that the dependent variable appears to have a positively skewed distribution and obey the exponential family of probability distributions. Also, most ministers in Taiwan during 2000 to 2016 were middle- aged men with doctorate degrees.
---Figure 1 inserted here---
---Table 1 inserted here---
V. Estimations and Findings
We conducted statistical analyses on R version 3.5.1. Multivariate Cox proportional hazard regression model is used to identify the effect of a one-unit change in each independent variable on the hazard of appointees’ resignation, while controlling for all other variables (Fox, 2002). By estimating hazard ratios (HR) from exponentiated coefficients in the model, hazard ratios greater than 1 indicates higher risk of resignation and a negative relationship between tenure and independent variables, and vice versa.
Table 2 shows our full model with all observations. We found that while holding the other covariates constant, media coverage has significant positive impact on increasing the hazard of ministers’ resignation (hazard ratio= 2.54, z-statistics= 3.84). This result is consistent with Hypothesis 1, which means that the more reports shown on the media, the shorter the tenure of a minister. The number of interpellations also had a significant effect, and the influences of committee interpellation and plenary interpellation are different, indicating support for both Hypothesis 2 and Hypothesis 3. Ministers tend to serve longer if they attend committee interpellation more frequently (hazard ratio= 0.73, z-statistics= -2.77). By contrast, plenary interpellation would shorten their tenure (hazard ratio= 2.04, z-statistics= 2.60). This is possibly because plenary interpellation may damage the reputation of ministers.
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As for personal factors, male ministers have on average a factor 1.93 hazard for resignation compared to female ministers. The result suggests that the average tenure of male ministers is shorter than that of female ministers. This finding is also consistent with other empirical research in Asia. In a similar study conducted in South Korea, Hahm et al. (2013) pointed out that since female ministers are more likely to be placed at symbolic and subordinated career positions, they could serve a longer period of time when compared to male ministers. Regarding organizational factors in the model, ministers who are appointed to core ministries, which are statutory qualification or have larger budget magnitude, have a lower risk of resignation (hazard ratio= 0.60, z-statistics= 2.65). This result suggests that department attributes is a determinant of ministers’ tenure in Taiwan.
---Table 2 inserted here---
As each president might have dissimilar leadership styles and management strategies. Scholars suggested that the administration of each president is a meaningful criterion to explore the research topic of appointment (Hahm, et al. 2013; Resh, 2015: 31-38). For example, a president might use strategic appointments in exchange for political support from parties or interest groups or seek fresh faces to refocus the new administration’s orientation (Lewis, 2011). In addition to the difference between administrations, the timing of appointment is also a crucial explanation as well. For example, Dull et al. (2009) showed that second term nominees will serve shorter length of tenure and there is relatively less importance and political leverage sided with a second term appointment. Resh (2015: 16-18) also pointed out that the president might switch the appointment strategy from ‘jigsaws management’ to ‘joints management’ on the second presidential term in order to implement policies smoothly.
Therefore, we created four period combinations for each phase during the administrations of Chen Shui-bian and Ma Ying-jeou, between 2000 and 2016. The combinations include ‘Chen Administration, first term’, ‘Chen Administration, second term’, ‘Ma Administration, first term’, and ‘Ma Administration, second term’. Figure 2 indicates that
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the tenure of ministers has a significant difference (p-value<0.001) between different combinations. Thus, we separate our data by different term of presidency and analyzed the subsets in the next section to explore the diversity of appointments.
---Figure 2 inserted here---
The competing models reported in Table 3 provide different perspectives of patterns for each period of administration. First, the media coverage has negative influences on the tenure of the ministers except during the second term of Ma’s administration. The most probable explanation of such results is that the source of UDN only included reports on the newspaper, but after 2012 the rapid development of social media had made it a crucial mode of communication (Johannessen et al, 2012). Hence, future research should pay more attention to the impact of social media. Additionally, we could not find stable influence from committee interpellation and plenary interpellation in both Chen’s and Ma’s administrations. Among individual and organizational factors in the competing models, there are other noise and inconsistencies in the model. First, the ministers in the party aligned to president Ma maintained longer length of tenure in the second term of Ma’s administration. Second, the ministers with administrative experience in the central government tend to serve longer during the second term of Chen’s administration, but tend to serve shorter period of time during the second term of the Ma administration. This puzzle result may reflect the harsh situations of Ma administration’s second term. To be more precisely, in the second term of Ma administration, Taiwan faced one of its most controversial protest called the ‘Sunflower Student Movement’ which happened on March 18, 2014. The public lacked trust and confidence toward the government during this period, hence, we argue that the Ma administration’s gradual loss of ruling legitimacy and authority in the second term contributed to such results.
In summary, we found that environmental factors such as media coverage, committee interpellation and plenary interpellation could influence the length of ministers’ tenure in the general model. These initial findings are consistent with our hypotheses. We argue that media
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coverage still has its influence after we separated the dataset into different administration terms, but no reliable relationship between dependent variable and other explanatory variables emerged in the competing models. These ambiguous results in the competing models may be caused by the inherent noise and error resulting from different political appointment styles of each president. Another reasonable explanation is the small sample size bias which leads to fragile statistical power and influences the result in the competing models. We discuss the results and their theoretical values in the next section.
---Table 3 inserted here---
VI. Discussion
Based on the above empirical results, we found that media coverage is an important factor which could influence the tenure of ministers, yet the effect of the legislators’ interpellation is still unclear. Hence, we further conducted 4 in-depth interviews (3 ministers and 1 reporter) in order to understand why ministers’ tenures are deeply affected by media coverage, and to better understand why the effect of legislators’ interpellation didn’t show as expected.
1. The Effect of Media Coverage
According to our findings above, media coverage is a critical explanatory variable in our quantitative results. If a minister was frequently reported on the UDN newspaper during his/her tenure, it would reduce the tenure of a minister. One of our respondents who was a UDN former reporter (R-1) provided us an insightful perspective about how mainstream media ‘press on’ a minister.
‘At the beginning of the development of instant news and the development of online media, there was a buzzword in the ministries of the Executive Yuan – ‘Officials destitute’, which indicated the horrible situations that ministers suffered from. Many ministers needed to pick up the phone from reporters even in the middle of the night. For example, the UDN newspaper once used that to revise the latest news at 3 a.m. (R-1).’
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Additionally, one respondent who used to be a minister (R-2) shared with us another insight that media coverage not only played as pressure on a minister but also affected their ‘boss’ – the president. This hint could reflect the political control of the president, the president seemed to prefer micro-management strategies when media paid a lot of attention to the government. The finding here is similar to the concept of political elasticity discussed by scholars such as Werlin (1988): the relationship between political leader and followers is dynamic. When the leaders encounter extreme situations, the micro-management strategy is more welcomed. The result of the interview supports the viewpoint of political elasticity and we argue that the president would be more likely to use direct power (i.e. micro-management) when he/she encountered a large number of media coverage.
‘I think it’s normal to receive a call from the president. ... When the president obtains some mainstream public opinion from newspaper or TV news, he would directly call the ministers for more detail on events or policies, and ask the departments to clarify to the public (R-2).’
Next, we focus on the impact of media on the political-executive nexus. One civil servant (R-3) we interviewed told us the importance of interaction skills with the media. Since the bureaucrats have more professional intelligence of a policy, the kind and instant assistance provided from bureaucrats would be useful for a minister when the minister needs to solve public relation crises. This is consistent with Askim et al. (2017)’s finding.
We argue that sometimes bureaucrats need to handle the media context for political appointees since they have more administrative knowledge than the ministers. In other words, the ministers also need to keep their relationships well to obtain those sincere advises.
‘Sometimes we have to take the initiative to release news and information based on our own knowledge to the media…the actions must be done fast to prevent damage to ministers’ reputation (R-3).’ 15
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2. The Effect of Legislators’ Interpellation
Although the effect of interpellation is not very solid in our quantitative models, the material from in-depth interviews may provide some support for our argument that the head of a ministry is a career choice with high pressure due to legislators’ interpellations. The respondent R-2 showed us the operation in the Congress and the irrational interpellation from legislators.
‘The most painful thing of a minister is being questioned in the Legislative Yuan. The general interpellation [plenary interpellation] is about one and a half months in every session, and you have to stay in the hall whether or not you will be questioned. … I think this is totally inefficient, and legislators would ask lots of trivial questions to make you embarrassed when he/she decides to assault a minister (R-2).’
About the political-executive nexus, one respondent who also used to be a minister (R-4) told us the importance of resisting pressure from legislators. If political appointees could withstand the pressures and temptations from political interests, they would be the shield of administrative neutrality of the bureaucracy. However, some studies argue that the political appointees are more like a double-edged sword, and increase the risk of bureaucracy politicization (Peters and Pierre, 2004). How to balance those two sides is still a central question in administrative studies.
‘I said to XXX [one of his subordinates] who is bad at handling legislators: “Let me handle those legislators!” I need to help the department to fight for budget in the Legislative Yuan, and let those executives do their stuff at ease (R-4).’
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VII. Conclusion
Numerous researches have indicated that the high turnover rates of political appointees would become a challenge to policy implementation and democratic governance (Cornell, 2014). Thus, it’s imperative to explore the factors that cause the resignation of ministers. We utilized the 2000-2016 tenure data of chief executives from 28 ministries in Taiwan’s central government, and collected media reports and legislators’ interpellations to examine such relationships using Cox proportional-hazards regression models for survival analysis. Our results found that the number of news reports and plenary interpellations are negatively related to the tenure of a minister, but the effect of committee interpellation is divergent. The results imply the importance of maintaining good public relation with the political environmental sphere such as the legislature and the media. Also, we utilized different models for different administrations and terms, but the evidences are not very clear nor consistent due to distinct appointment strategies and scenarios between Chen and Ma administrations. Finally, we complement quantitative results with qualitative materials to illustrate the effect of environmental factors in more depth.
This article makes contributions in three respects. First, by investigating the political management aspects of political appointees, it strengthens the analytic framework in executive leadership, especially in the context of Taiwan. Second, it fills the academic void regarding the function of external factors. Third, the findings of this article bring implications for practitioners in Taiwan and other countries when facing institutional reforms.
Acknowledgments
This article is sponsored by Ministry of Science and Technology research program ‘Hidden Patterns of Appointing Ministers and Agency Head (2008-2018)’ (106-2410-H-004- 093-MY2).
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Figure 1: Research Structure
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4th International Conference on Public Policy (ICPP4) June 26-28, 2019 – Montréal
Figure 2: The Survival Probability in Different Administration Terms
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4th International Conference on Public Policy (ICPP4) June 26-28, 2019 – Montréal
Table 1: Summary Statistics for the Variables
Mean Min. Variable Definition (S. D.) Max.
788.30 70 Length of Tenure Total calendar days during ministers' tenure (519.40) 2922
42.88 1.2 Media Coverage The number of reports during ministers' tenure (42.99) 258.6
1.25 0 The number of being inquired in the committee Committee Interpellation (1.07) 5.3 interpellation during ministers' tenure
0.67 0 The number of being inquired in the plenary Plenary Interpellation (0.45) 2.2 interpellation during ministers' tenure
0.84 0 Male =1, Gender (0.37) 1 Female =0
55.57 32 Age ministers' age in years (7.54) 68
Bachelor =0, 1.37 0 Education level Master =1, (0.79) 2 PhD. =2
0.56 0 =1 if appointees had executive experience in Administrative Experience (0.50) 1 central government
0.37 0 =1 if appointees belonged to the same party with Party Identification (0.48) 1 president
0.41 0 Core Ministry =1 if appointees be nominated to core ministries (0.49) 1
0.55 0 =1 if appointees be nominated to highly complex Ministry Complexity (0.50) 1 ministries
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4th International Conference on Public Policy (ICPP4) June 26-28, 2019 – Montréal
Table 2 Pooled Cox Hazard Analysis of Ministers’ Length of Tenure
Pooled Cox Hazard Analysis of Ministers’ Length of Tenure
Variables Hazard Ratio z-Statistic
Media Coverage 2.54** 3.84
Committee Interpellation 0.73** -2.77
Plenary Interpellation 2.04** 2.60
Male 1.93** 3.12
Age 0.99 -0.92
Education level: Master 0.96 -0.21
Education level: PhD. 1.05 0.25
Administrative Experience 1.04 0.26
Party Identification 0.79 -1.60
Core Ministry 0.60** -2.65
Ministry Complexity 0.81 -1.31
Potential Term 1.00** -3.96
N=214, Rsquare= 0.207, Concordance= 0.640 logrank test = 49.65 (df=12), p-value<0.001 Wald test = 49.79 (df=12), p-value<0.001
* Statistical significance at the 0.05 level; ** Statistical significance at the 0.01 level.
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4th International Conference on Public Policy (ICPP4) June 26-28, 2019 – Montréal
Table 3 Competed Cox Hazard Analysis of Ministers’ Length of Tenure
Chen Administration Ma Administration
first term second term first term second term
(2000-2004) (2004-2008) (2008-2012) (2012-2016)
Hazard Ratio Hazard Ratio Hazard Ratio Hazard Ratio
Media Coverage 3.17** 9.40** 7.32** 2.77
Committee Interpellation 0.77 1.17 0.52* 0.63
Plenary Interpellation 1.24 0.14* 2.94 0.53
Male 2.01 0.99 1.67 3.37
Age 1.02 1.01 1.00 0.90
Education level: Master 1.19 0.50 1.91 0.79
Education level: PhD. 1.16 1.07 1.63 2.34
Administrative Experience 0.89 0.36* 0.98 4.05*
Party Identification 0.66 1.82 1.69 0.23*
Core Ministry 0.73 0.65 0.38* 1.75
Ministry Complexity 1.06 1.32 0.51 0.98
Potential Term 1.00 1.00** 1.00** 0.99**
Obervations= 63 Obervations= 54 Obervations= 60 Obervations= 37 Rsquare= 0.257, Rsquare= 0.632, Rsquare= 0.449, Rsquare= 0.798,
logrank test = 18.71 logrank test = 53.94 logrank test = 35.79 logrank test = 59.14 p=0.09 p<0.001 p<0.001 p<0.001
* Statistical significance at the 0.05 level; ** Statistical significance at the 0.01 level
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4th International Conference on Public Policy (ICPP4) June 26-28, 2019 – Montréal
Appendix A: Correlation Matrix
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 1. Tenure 1.00 2. Media Coverage -0.23 1.00 3. Plenary Interpellation -0.21 0.66 1.00 4. Committee Interpellation -0.10 0.66 0.72 1.00 5. Gender -0.19 0.03 0.11 0.11 1.00 6. Age -0.01 -0.03 0.10 0.06 0.24 1.00 7. Education level -0.10 0.07 0.03 0.06 0.15 0.00 1.00 8. Administrative Experience -0.07 0.11 0.20 0.15 0.19 0.25 -0.08 1.00 9. Party Identification 0.05 0.06 0.07 0.04 -0.05 -0.20 -0.14 0.03 1.00 10. Core Ministry 0.00 -0.29 -0.33 -0.29 -0.20 -0.31 -0.16 -0.23 0.06 1.00 11. Ministry Complexity -0.03 0.50 0.56 0.49 0.12 0.29 -0.10 0.18 -0.04 -0.36 1.00 12. Potential Term 0.15 0.17 -0.04 -0.02 -0.03 -0.28 -0.09 -0.23 -0.05 0.04 -0.12 1.00
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