Does a Longer Tenure of Local Government Heads Affect the Performance of Local Governments?: A Case of South Korea

Incumbent elected heads of local governments (HOLGs) claim that their longer term in office would expand their administrative expertise and allow them to draw more budgets and grants from the central government by using enhanced bargaining capacity and informal networks with the central government. However, as they serve longer, HOLGs can be exposed to a higher risk of being coopted and captured by local business interests and career bureaucrats, leading to higher incidents of corruption in their jurisdictions. While the relationship between the length of the tenure of HOLGs and local governments’ performance remains ambiguous without much empirical evidence, the Korean government has limited the tenure of HOLGs up to three consecutive terms (12 years). In this context, this study examines the relationship between HOGLs’ length of tenure and local governments’ performance―operationalized in terms of efficiency, integrity, and the ability to draw budgets from the central government―by applying the fixed effect panel model and by using the central government data on local governments from 2008 to 2014. Our findings suggest that the impacts of HOLGs’ tenure length vary according to the level of analysis, and in terms of the levels of efficiency and integrity. The negative relationship between the tenure length and efficiency is apparent among local governments that demonstrate a high level of efficiency. Moreover, for the local governments whose corruption level is high, the relationship between the tenure length and integrity was negative, while the relationship is the opposite for local governments that show a high level of efficiency. However, these relationships disappear when we control for time invariant factors that are specific to local governments using the year and unit fixed panel model.