This chapter uses Taiwan’s case to address the following questions: What context constitutes the practice of patronage in Taiwan? What are the strategies for patronage appointments? With literature review, secondary resources, and in-depth interview data, the authors indicate that Taiwans patronage appointments are highly tangled with the history of democratization and a solid civil service system. Therefore, the elements of loyalty and expertise coexist in the practice of Taiwans patronage appointments. In addition, the authors also embed Taiwans case into the unified framework of patronage appointments, analyzing the observed types of patronage and potential explanatory factors. This chapter could provide useful insights for further comparative research when it comes to exploring the differences and similarities between Asian countries political patronage issues.

This chapter provides a brief account of political appointments in the South Korean government, with a particular attention to presidential appointments. We also demonstrate why appointments of cabinet ministers warrant further scholarly attention. Then, we assess presidential appointments of ministers in an empirical manner. In the analytical section of the chapter, we first describe in detail how we have constructed a novel dataset. In presenting the analysis results, we first describe major demographic characteristics of the country’s past cabinet ministers and illustrate their major career paths prior to their ministerial appointments. We also categorize the past appointments into the six types of political patronage per Peters’ typology. Our findings reveal that, in South Korea, programmatic technocrats are the dominant group of presidential appointees regardless of regime and ministry. Among those programmatic technocrats, nearly half are former bureaucrats. Our findings also suggest that, while the vast majority of the South Korean ministers are programmatic technocrats, there are some notable differences across regimes and ministries.