Erik Mobrand - Top-Down Democracy in South Korea

KOREAN STUDIES OF THE HENRY M. JACKSON SCHOOL OF INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

Clark W. Sorensen, Editor

KOREAN STUDIES OF THE HENRY M. JACKSON SCHOOL OF INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

Over the Mountains Are Mountains: Korean Peasant Households and Their Adaptations to Rapid Industrialization , by Clark W. Sorensen

Cultural Nationalism in Colonial Korea, 19201925 , by Michael Edson Robinson, with a new preface by the author

Offspring of Empire: The Kochang Kims and the Colonial Origins of Korean Capitalism, 18761945 , by Carter J. Eckert, with a new preface by the author

Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions: Yu Hyngwn and the Late Chosn Dynasty , by James B. Palais

Peasant Protest and Social Change in Colonial Korea , by Gi-Wook Shin

The Origins of the Chosn Dynasty , by John B. Duncan

Protestantism and Politics in Korea , by Chung-shin Park

Marginality and Subversion in Korea: The Hong Kyngnae Rebellion of 1812 , by Sun Joo Kim

Building Ships , Building a Nation: Koreas Democratic Unionism under Park Chung Hee , by Hwasook Nam

Japanese Assimilation Policies in Colonial Korea, 19101945 , by Mark E. Caprio

Fighting for the Enemy: Koreans in Japans War, 19371945 , by Brandon Palmer

Heritage Management in Korea and Japan: The Politics of Antiquity and Identity , by Hyung Il Pai

Wrongful Deaths: Selected Inquest Records from Nineteenth-Century Korea , compiled and translated by Sun Joo Kim and Jungwon Kim

The Emotions of Justice: Gender, Status, and Legal Performance in Chosn Korea , by Jisoo M. Kim

Buddhas and Ancestors: Religion and Wealth in Fourteenth-Century Korea , by Juhn Ahn

Flowering Plums and Curio Cabinets: The Culture of Objects in Late Chosn Korean Art , by Sunglim Kim

Top-Down Democracy in South Korea , by Erik Mobrand

TOP-DOWN DEMOCRACY IN SOUTH KOREA

ERIK MOBRAND

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS

Seattle

Top-Down Democracy in South Korea was made possible in part by a grant from the Donald R. Ellegood International Publications Endowment.

The Korea Foundation provided financial assistance for the publication of this project.

Additional support was provided by the Korea Studies Program of the University of Washington in cooperation with the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies.

Copyright 2019 by the University of Washington Press

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For H.

We cannot conclude that the influence of the democratic formula and the suffrage mechanism is always the same. When circumstances change, the influence may well have quite different results, just as planting seeds may have quite different results in autumn from those that follow in spring.

JAMES BURNHAM, THE MACHIAVELLIANS

In many new polyarchies, particularism vigorously inhabits most formal political institutions, yet the incumbency of top government posts is decided by the universalistic process of fairly counting each vote as one. This may sound paradoxical but it is not: it means that these are polyarchies, but they are neither the ones that the theory of democracy had in mind as it grew out of reflection on the political regimes of the global Northwest, not what many studies of democratization assume that a democracy should be or become. To understand these cases we need to know what games are really being played and under what rules.

GUILLERMO ODONNELL, ILLUSIONS ABOUT CONSOLIDATION

Contents

Preface

When I mentioned to a Korean colleague that I was writing a book about democracy in his country, he joked that it must be a short book. His retort alludes to a criticism of the countrys politics. What could Koreans possibly know about democracy? After all, this line of thinking suggests, they have little experience sorting out what democracy is and learning how to do it. Scandals, corruption, and protests are staples of political life in South Korea that suggest a society fumbling to grasp democracys meaning.

This way of thinking is common in writing about South Korea, as well as discussion of any newer democracy. Democratic debutants are situated along a path traversed by veteran democracies of the West. Successes in a peripheral country are attributed to the power of democracy. Troubles are chalked up to failure to fully assimilate democratic practices. Any meditation on democracy based on thinking about a place like South Korea is then limited to a study of democracy within the boundaries of that context.

Actually, most of us are still fumbling with democracy. That is probably because democracy is not mathematics, not a subject that can be mastered at school; it is a mode of politics. Koreans fumble no more with democracy than do Americans or British or French or Japanese. For nearly three decades, the country has met the widely accepted criteria of a functioning democracy: the state protects basic civil and political rights (though imperfectly), and it selects top leaders through mass multiparty elections. South Korea has as much ownership of democracy as does any country.

If Koreans have a right to say what democracy is, then we can possibly learn something more generally from South Koreas democratic experience. The context of South Koreas democracy, in a postcolonial state on a peninsula still riven by Cold War politics, is not the same as the contexts of many other democracies. But politics always happens in some context, and there is no scientific way to privilege one context over another. To better understand democracy, we should examine how it operates in a variety of societies. A truly global political science, far from seeking universal laws based on concepts that stretch to the point of breaking when traveling too many places, can draw attention to and learn from the worlds real diversity. This book is offered in that spirit. It is not about democracy in Korea, which seems to imply democracy limited to Korea; it is about both democracy and Korea.

The tensions inherent in democracy are at the heart of the analysis in the following pages. The top-down dimension to representative politics is a long-standing concern in democratic theory. To draw attention to oligarchic aspects of South Koreas politics is not to criticize the countrys democracy, nor to say that all politics there is top-down (far from it!), but rather to place ideas developed from thinking about this corner of the world into dialogue with existing ideas about democracys contradictions.

This book is itself also the product of learning from different parts of the world. Social science ideas are not generated in a vacuum. Where one sits can shape the questions one asks and how one thinks. I am fortunate to have had opportunities to spend long periods of time in fascinating places where my mind could be stimulated through conversations with people of diverse backgrounds. I began this book in Singapore, perhaps not the likeliest of places to write a book on democracy. There I found myself thinking about Korean politics in relation to other Asian societies. Sitting with Southeast Asianist colleagues over lunch, or reading the regional news on the bus, my mind wandered to South Korea. Because where one lives informs ones priorities and concerns, being far from the main production sites of English-language scholarship provides expanded chances to encounter and explore less-worn lines of inquiry. Here is the main benefit to working in Asia while doing Asia research: it is not the proximity to fieldwork sites nor the access to local expertise, but the possibility of stumbling upon and developing fresh ways of thinking about social problems. As a student of Korea living in Southeast Asia, I found wonderful opportunities for fruitful stumbling.