The Experience of Active Representation in South Korea: How Marriage-Based Immigrant Public Servants Represent Their Clients

A long research tradition has argued that representative public servants regularly advocate for the interests of clients like themselves-whether similarity is based on race, ethnicity, or gender. This article broadens the representative bureaucracy literature to explore a different basis for advocacy (marriage-based immigrant status) using unique qualitative data. To explore the experience of representation from the perspective of public servants, we conducted semi-structured interviews with marriage-based immigrant public servants in South Korea in 2017. Our results indicate that while marriage-based immigrant public servants actively attempt to address the needs of the marriage-based immigrant population, advocacy is often a learned behavior rather than the reason public servants sought their positions. It is also observed that their efforts to represent the marriage-based immigrant population are heavily limited by institutional factors of South Korea such as insecure job status and the lack of a critical mass of marriage-based immigrant public servants.