Polarized Politics In South Korea

South Korea is one of the most successful cases of democratization and economic growth in the world. It shares one troubling problem with many other countries in recent years: the visible increase of extreme polarization in the language and emotions of political topics. However, Korea has experienced this problem much earlier. The history created weak parties that use deeply effective but harmful stories. This combination creates a downwards spiral where the performance of moral superiority becomes the sharpest weapon. The author points out that we need a standard for viewing this growing problem and argues that the traits of polarization in language are not well understood. Using partisan newspaper text data from 1990 to 2014 and quantitative text analysis, this book collects the most typical emotions and topics used by parties and partisans, analyzing why they exist. In the age of digital data and possibly restricted mobility, this book is a proposal for what the author calls “Computational Area Studies” and “Distant Fieldwork.”

Essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary Korea and East Asia, this book provides a comprehensive and balanced introduction to contemporary Korean politics. It explicates the great changes in South Korea, which has gone from being one of the poorest nations to a proud member of the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation while making the transition to democracy. The work focuses on the geopolitical and cultural setting, historical evolution, institutional foundation, dynamics of political leadership, and political and administrative processes of Korean politics. It also features chapters on political determinants of the rise and decline of the Korean economy, foreign and unification policy of South Korea, and political development and decay in North Korea.

Like in many other states worldwide, democracy is in trouble in South Korea, entering a state of regression in the past decade, barely thirty years after its emergence in 1987. The contributors to this volume trace the sources of illiberalism in today’s Korea.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.

This book studies the sources of inequality in contemporary South Korea and the social and political contention this engenders. Korean society is becoming more polarized. Demands for ‘economic democratization’ and a fairer redistribution of wealth occupy centre-stage of political campaigns, debates and discourse. The contributions offer perspectives on this wide-ranging socio-political change by examining the transformation of organized labour, civil society, the emergence of new cleavages in society, and the growing ethnic diversity of Korea’s population. Bringing together a team of scholars on Korea’s transition and democratization, the story the books tells is one of a society acutely divided by the neo-liberal policies that accompanied and followed the Asian financial crisis. Taken together, the contributions argue that tackling inequalities are challenges that Korean policy-makers can no longer postpone. The solution, however, cannot be imposed, once again, from the top down, but needs to arise from a broader conversation including all segments of Korean society. The book is intended for a readership interested in South Korean politics specifically, and global experiences in transition more generally.

A comparative look at North and South Korea's political and economic institutions and processes, and an examination of their evolution since 1945. Problems such as leadership succession, democratization, nuclear weapons, education and reunification are explored.

This controversial new study, breaks with the tradition of basing political studies on analyses of institutions and political personalities, by likening the Republic of Korea to a laboratory for the clash of political cultures. In the late 1940s, the Americans embarked upon a democratization programme designed to create a Western bulwark against the spread of communism in East Asia. The intervening years have seen the advent and demise of military rule, with South Korea now having a democratically-elected government. Although the US strategy thus seems successful, the political crises of 1995 in fact indicate that many obstacles remain here to the adoption of Western-style democracy. This study argues that socialization in general and political socialization in particular are key factors in any analysis of democracy, be it in Korea or elsewhere. Accordingly, the work draws on moral education textbooks, together with surveys and interviews among members of the urban intellectual elite. In this manner, the psychological roots of power and authority - key concepts to an understanding of 'good government' - are explored.

Thirty years have passed since in 1987 formal democratization was achieved in South Korea. Since then the country has undergone the two turnover test (Huntington), and it overcame economic, financial, and political crises. However, social inequality is higher than before democratization, social conflict has been exacerbating, and political polarization has been on the rise. South Korea's democracy has been going through a continuous stress test trying the polity's capacity to heal social conflict, integrate society, and mature politics as meeting these challenges is key to sustainable consolidation of democracy. The chapters of this edited volume, written by experts from South Korea and Germany in respective fields, examine the way in which South Korea has coped with these challenges in its political system, political economy, and political society since its transition to formal democracy, and provide a focused critical assessment of three decades after democratization.