Demystifying the Hermit Kingdom: The constitution and public administration in North Korea

Abstract

Background Situations of extreme information deficit regarding administrative behavior are rare, but such conditions persist for the most enigmatic and troubling nations, such as North Korea. How might the behavior of public administrators be explained when systematic observation of individual administrators or institutions’ parties is not feasible?

Aim Finding a way to estimate administrative behavior based upon the information available is an important task in understanding the complexities of closed states’ behavior in the international arena.

Method We use constitutional analysis to explain public administration in North Korea, arguing that this is the best available method to explain administrative norms and behavior in this and other closed nations.

Results We find that while administrative theorists predict that administrative norms can be predicted using constitutional analysis, administrative behavior in closed nations cannot be efficiently predicted using only a reconstructed set of norms as we do not have evidence to confirm that the suppositions of normative theorists hold in these conditions.

Conclusions While we can better understand the values of administrators in North Korea through constitutional analysis, without harder evidence we can only speculate on the true values of administrators in North Korea.

Points for practitioners

Administrators working on cross-national issues with closed states like North Korea should familiarize themselves with the values of the states’ constitution, as this may be a stable source of preliminary norms for predicting administrators’ behavior.