Governance & Public Administration
Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Public Administration & Graduate School of Governance · Sungkyunkwan University
I am a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Public Administration and the Graduate School of Governance at SKKU. My work sits at the intersection of bureaucratic politics and behavioral public administration, asking how political turbulence, administrative frictions, and motivation shape the people who carry out public policy.
I earned my PhD in Public Policy and Management from the University of Southern California's Sol Price School of Public Policy, with a dissertation on mission match, reputation, and bureaucratic motivation. Before joining SKKU, I was an assistant professor at Korea University's Graduate School of Public Administration, where I taught The Korean Bureaucracy, Behavioral Public Administration, AI Governance, and Research Methods in Social Sciences — and received the Teaching Excellence Award in 2024.
At USC I was a research affiliate of the Civic Leadership Education and Research (CLEAR) Initiative, leading collaborations funded by the Haynes Foundation and the Volcker Alliance on the public-sector labor market of the Los Angeles region. Most recently, my co-authored work on the 2018–2019 U.S. federal government shutdown received the Herbert Kaufman Best Paper Award from APSA's Section on Public Administration.
How exogenous political shocks disrupt the administrative state. We trace the effects of the 2018–2019 U.S. federal shutdown on turnover, recruitment, and policy implementation — work published in Governance and Public Administration Review and recognized with APSA's Herbert Kaufman Best Paper Award.
Experimental and survey evidence on how citizens tolerate — or reject — administrative frictions: red tape and rule legitimacy, burden tolerance across policy domains, and the behavioral foundations of citizen-state interaction. I currently serve on the OECD Behavioural Insights Team's Sludge Audit expert panel.
How governments adopt — and how public servants and citizens receive — emerging technologies: public employees' attitudes toward AI adoption and satisfaction with AI-driven public service delivery.
A comparative and Korean agenda: the micro-foundations of central-local government collaboration, involuntary backsourcing and organizational identity in public bureaucracies, and the politicization of the administrative state — including the bureaucracy of the second Trump administration seen through Korean eyes.
Choi, H., & Ahn, Y.
Cities, 179, 107595
Ahn, Y., & Choi, H.
Review of Public Personnel Administration
Resh, W., Ahn, Y., Wang, W., & Lee, E.
Public Administration Review, 85(6), 1682–1696
Choi, H., & Ahn, Y.
The Korean Public Administration Quarterly, 37(3), 473–503
Ahn, Y.
The Korean Local Government Studies, 29(2), 271–292
Ahn, Y.
The Korean Public Administration Review, 59(1), 39–66
Ahn, Y., & Jong, J.
Administration & Society, 56(9–10), 1083–1103
Resh, W., Ahn, Y., & Moynihan, D.
Governance, 37(S1), 61–82
Campbell, J. W., & Ahn, Y.
Asia Pacific Journal of Public Administration, 45(4), 362–384
Park, J., & Ahn, Y.
Public Performance & Management Review, 46(1), 165–192
Ahn, Y., & Campbell, J. W.
Public Performance & Management Review, 46(1), 86–112
Ahn, Y.
Public Personnel Management, 51(3), 355–379
Ahn, Y., & Campbell, J. W.
Administration & Society, 54(9), 1651–1688
Park, J., & Ahn, Y.
The American Review of Public Administration, 52(1), 15–35
Ahn, Y., & Resh, W.
In Research Handbook on Motivation in Public Administration (pp. 10–27), Edward Elgar
