Changing Perspectives on Governance: Evidence From Government Press Releases in South Korea and the United States

The “Future of Governing” has been discussed for over 20 years. Many scholars agree that the transformation of government is prevalent; however, questions remain unanswered regarding the direction of these changes and how they have unfolded differently across countries. By analysing all the press releases of the US federal departments (including large agencies such as the SSA and EPA) and the corresponding ministries of the South Korean government, this study responds to those questions. Since the primary function of press releases is to announce and inform the public about the administrative actions of the departments, they are suitable for analysing changes in perspectives in practice. We mapped each press release in embedding space using downstream tasks of a pre‐trained language model and clustered them into market, participative, flexible, deregulated governance, or traditional hierarchy model. Identifying trajectories of these changes through dimension reduction and clustering analysis, this study found a significant shift toward participative models in the US, while South Korea exhibited a gradual and incremental movement toward market models. This study contributes to the extant literature on governance by tracking evolving governance perspectives and offering several insights into administrative reforms.