South Korea is regarded as an exemplary case of democratic transition amongst third-wave democracies in Asia. In this issue briefing, Prof. Jai Kwan Jung examines the trajectory of democratic development in South Korea by focusing on the role of civil society in the transition to and the consolidation of democracy in the country. While civil society mainly constituted a ‘contentious’ civil society against authoritarianism during democratic transition, it has transformed itself to a diversified and peaceful civil society since then. Nonetheless, Prof. Jung argues that while strong civil society is a historic legacy of the country’s democratization, there are also pitfalls: when strong civil society is combined with weak political parties and divided along the ideological spectrum, it can turn into a liability for democracy by undermining institutional politics and fuelling populism.
South Korea’s Democratic Development in Comparison
South Korea is one of the most successful cases among 91 cases of democratic transitions since the third-wave of democratization. Using the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) data, Mainwaring and Bizzarro (2019) categorize the outcomes of those 91 cases that transitioned to democracy from 1974 to 2012 as democratic breakdown, erosion, stagnation, and advance. While 23 of 91 cases (25.3%) are classified as democratic advance, only 8 cases (8.8%) have reached the level of liberal democracy.South Korea is one of those 8 successful cases and the second-best case, following Portugal, which has most improved the quality of democracy from the year of regime transition.
Figure 1 compares South Korea’s post-transition trajectory with five other third-wave democracies in Asia – Taiwan, Mongolia, Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand. Since its transition to democracy in 1987, South Korea’s quality of democracy consistently increased and reached the level of liberal democracy (i.e., 0.7 in the Liberal Democracy Index) in 1998, when the Kim Dae-jung government was inaugurated. But South Korean trajectory of democratic development is not unilinear. The liberal principles of democracy came to decay substantively from 2008 to 2016 during two conservative governments. This downward trend was most pronounced in 2014 when the Park Geun-hye government faced a governing crisis after the Sewol ferry disaster, in which 304 people, including 250 high-school students on their field trip to Jeju Island, were drowned. This governing crisis was further fueled by the Park Geun-hye and Choi Soon-sil corruption scandal and led to the massive wave of candlelight protests in 2016. A total of 17 million people participated in 6-month long Saturday protests from October 2016 to April 2017. It was a historic moment in South Korea, not just because of the unprecedented size and peacefulness of mass mobilization. For the first time in the history of Korean democracy, the 2016-17 candlelight protests resulted in the impeachment of an incumbent president through due constitutional procedures. The candlelight protests seem to have saved Korean democracy, since its liberal democracy score increased and passed again the cut-point of 0.7 in 2017.
If we look at the post-transition trajectories of other Asian democracies in Figure 1, Taiwan and Mongolia can be also classified as democratic advance. Yet in terms of the level of liberal democracy, only Taiwan is comparable with South Korea. Mongolia’s quality of democracy has been closer to Indonesia, which shows a pattern of stagnation since the transition to democracy. Philippines and Thailand clearly show the vulnerability of third-wave democracies. These two new democracies experienced democratic breakdown in 2004 and 2006 respectively, as 34 of 91 third-wave democracies have done so (37.4%).