The purpose of this study is to understand the causes of formalism of cultural policy by using institutional change theory. To this end, the process of enactment of the ‘Law for Promotion of Regional Culture’ was adopted as a case study. The law w... The purpose of this study is to understand the causes of formalism of cultural policy by using institutional change theory. To this end, the process of enactment of the ‘Law for Promotion of Regional Culture’ was adopted as a case study. The law was dramatically legislated through a very long deliberation, but was criticized as a legislation of formalism as soon as it was promulgated. The formalism that occurred during the process of legislation of the Law for Promotion of Regional Culture was pointed out in two aspects. First, the clauses in the existing law have been reorganized and formalized for legislative achievement, while the clauses necessary for the effective enforcement of the law such as financial matters are omitted. Secondly, it does not reflect the core idea of self-government of local culture, the result of which is contrary to the original purpose of local culture promotion policy. This study regards the second aspect as the more fundamental formalism and seeks to understand its causes. Formalism that occurs in the process of establishing a new policy in the form of a new legislation is hard to grasp as a formalism study. It is because the formalism study generally evaluates the results of policy action based on existing policy standards. I adopted such notions as ‘symbolic change of institution’ and ‘institutional decoupling’ from Neo-institutionalism. In particular, not only the divergence in formalism legislation but also the divergence from discourse bias were analyzed to understand the aspect and cause of the occurrence of the formalism better. By applying the concept of 'institutional decoupling', I analyzed the cause of the acts of formalism by the members of the National Assembly who agreed on the enactment of the law in December 2013, while abandoning the clause of fund which guarantees the effectiveness of the law. The deliberation of the bill in December 2013 was a case of dilemma in which the pressure of institutional change accumulated over 10 years was confronting the pressure that constrained the change with existing public administration standards. The members of the National Assembly and officials of the Ministry of Culture in charge of legislation have selectively adopted the elements which provided the legitimacy for them, while neglecting the rest of the pressures. It is difficult for public administrators to meet all of those conflicting legitimacy values such as the public benefits, efficiency and the timely change. Therefore, it is analyzed that the formalism occurs by getting strongly coupled only with a specific value and loosely coupled with the remaining parts. In this study, I further analyzed why the idea of self-government of local culture was omitted from the original bill. To this end, the qualitative coding was applied to the discourses of promotion of local culture by members of National Assembly, local governors, local artists & cultural specialists, officials of the Ministry of Culture, and the local foundations of culture. As a result, it was confirmed that all agents generally recognized the importance of the "cultural identity" among the five meanings of promotion of local culture. However, the members of Assembly emphasized “cultural welfare” and the local governors followed “cultural economy”, while local artists & cultural specialists followed “cultural autonomy”. In other words, it was confirmed that there was discourse bias in the bill of law which was summarized by the members of the Assembly. I interpreted this phenomenon that the proposed bill only contained the meaning of the promotion of regional culture selectively perceived by legislators as a decoupling phenomenon in institutionalization process through discoursive activities. Among the pressures of institutional changes brought about by the discourses of promotion of local culture including the plural meaning, the members of Assembly actively got coupled with the pressure of the discourse of cultural identity and culture welfare. But they responded with the decoupling strategy toward the other pressures of the other meanings. The reason why such institutional decoupling was possible is that the word 'promotion of local culture' can be interpreted in various ways. In addition, it could be easily connected with the discourse of cultural administration. In other words, cultural autonomy did not act as strong institutionalization pressure that the Assembly members who prepared the legislation should necessarily get coupled with, and there was a possibility that it could be replaced with 'cultural administration discourse' which can be solved by law enactment itself. The institutional decoupling in the process of enactment of the Law for Promotion of Regional Culture was possible by policy language with multiple meanings such as 'regional culture promotion' and 'cultural prosperity'. In fact, while emphasizing only some semantic elements, the 'framing' seemed to be included strategically. In order to minimize disputes, it was effective to adopt the frame of discursive activity based on the meaning of value-neutral and 'de-politicalized' for smooth and fast legislation. In this study, 'imperfect institutionalization caused by the ambiguity of the meaning of the policy language' was recognized as the fundamental cause of the formalism in the formation phase of the policy. This formalism is mainly a form of ‘discourse bias’ in legislative or policy making process. This is often confirmed in cases where policy is transplanted or bureaucrats use policy words in slogans or rhetoric types. It is the imperfect institutionalization of policy that the actors related to the institution can not share the meaning. Since the semantics of language is ambiguous over the conflicting values of each other by utilizing the multiplicity, on the surface, the substance and the harm are not easily confirmed. However, the more the policy is implemented as a new policy, the more fundamental errors are revealed. This phenomenon is currently frequent, because the legislative activities of the parliamentarians are oriented only to performance and the public officials avoids the fundamental controversy about the conflicting values of the multi-polarized society. Utilizing the result of this study, I analyzed the characteristics and causes of formalism frequently observed in the cultural policy implemented as the 'golden key to the social problem'. As for the major reasons for the formalism of cultural policy in recent years, I pointed out as follows; the lack of consensus on the value of culture and the performance indicators of cultural policy, strong governmental leadership of Korean society which leads to institutional import ignoring the social context, the situation that value dilemma of cultural policy is large, but the value debate is insufficient, the reality that the choice of policy is mainly made for the political benefit rather than by the policy decision based on the cultural value debate, wide meaning of culture and the versatility of the policy language, cultural policy language in form of the slogan and rhetorical expression, and top-down policy planning method that does not properly reflect the perception of the field. This study suggests that the actors’ enlightenment and the free expression of ideas are important for the public policies to communicate with the environments without sticking to the interests of the specific groups. In addition, This study suggests that formalism inevitably occurs when institutionalizing the action of the field by law. Thus, in order to minimize such formalism, it is necessary to converge public opinion based on the value debates instead of following the existing practices and the efficiency of de-politicalization. Key words: formalism, institutional change, institutional decoupling, de-politicalization, Law for promotion of regional culture, cultural policy change
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