Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-06-26
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, korea
South Korea has long occupied a privileged position in the global discourse on democratization. For decades, scholars of comparative politics and development practitioners held up the Republic of Korea as irrefutable evidence that authoritarian developmental states could transition peacefully and durably into liberal democracies — a process consolidating not only formal electoral institutions but a vibrant civil society, an independent judiciary, and robust press freedoms. This "poster child" status was not merely rhetorical. The Korean transition from military rule in 1987, the subsequent peaceful transfers of power across ideological lines, the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye in 2017 through mass popular mobilization, and the institutional response that followed all seemed to confirm that Korean democracy had achieved the kind of self-correcting resilience that democratic theorists prize above all. Yet the events of late 2024 and the political turbulence that followed have forced a fundamental reassessment. The question now animating scholars of Korean politics and democracy studies globally is no longer whether South Korea is a success story, but whether it is in the process of becoming a cautionary tale.
The scholarly context into which this article intervenes is significant. The global literature on democratic backsliding — associated with work by Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way, Anna Grzymala-Busse, and others — has largely focused on cases in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. Hungary's Fidesz, Poland's PiS, Bolsonaro's Brazil, and Duterte's Philippines became the paradigmatic instances of what scholars now call "democratic erosion from within": the dismantling of democratic norms and institutions not through a coup d'état but through legally sanctioned, incremental executive overreach. South Korea, by contrast, appeared structurally resistant to such dynamics. Its civil society organizations retained extraordinary mobilizing capacity, its Constitutional Court had demonstrated genuine independence, and its legislature — fractured and contentious as it was — served as a genuine check on executive power. The question raised by this article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia is therefore methodologically and empirically loaded: if backsliding can occur in South Korea, what does that say about the theoretical conditions scholars believed were sufficient to prevent it?
The events that brought this question to a head center on the December 2024 declaration of martial law by President Yoon Suk-yeol, a development that stunned observers both domestically and internationally. What is analytically striking is not merely the act itself — which was rapidly reversed following legislative intervention — but what it revealed about the underlying tensions within South Korean democratic governance. The Yoon administration's confrontational posture toward the opposition-controlled National Assembly, its aggressive use of prosecutorial powers against political rivals, its strained relationship with public broadcasters, and its rhetoric delegitimizing opposition forces as instruments of anti-state subversion all fit recognizable patterns in the comparative backsliding literature. The martial law episode represented, in this reading, not an aberration but the culmination of a trajectory of norm erosion that had been building across the administration's tenure. Whether South Korea's institutional guardrails — the swift legislative nullification of the decree, the subsequent impeachment proceedings, the Constitutional Court's engagement — represent successful democratic self-correction or merely a temporary arrest of deeper authoritarian impulses is precisely the empirical and normative question that scholars must now grapple with.
From a regional and global ODA perspective, this trajectory carries implications that extend well beyond South Korean domestic politics. South Korea has in recent decades emerged as a significant donor country and soft power actor, positioning its own developmental trajectory as a model for aid recipient nations across Africa, Southeast Asia, and beyond. The Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) has explicitly woven narratives of democratization and good governance into its programming philosophy, with South Korea's own transition from recipient to donor serving as the animating success story. Democratic backsliding, or even credible scholarly debate about it, complicates this export model considerably. If the institutions and civil society norms that were presumed to have consolidated South Korean democracy are proving more fragile than thought, then the applicability of the Korean model to development programming in fragile or transitional democracies elsewhere must be interrogated. Aid practitioners and researchers at institutions focused on civil society development cannot afford to treat the Korean case as a settled benchmark while its democratic health remains a subject of live scholarly controversy.
Looking forward, this article is likely to generate substantial scholarly response and has the potential to reframe how the Korean case is deployed in comparative democratization research. The most important contribution may be its insistence on treating South Korea as a case still in motion — subject to the same pressures of executive aggrandizement, polarization, and institutional stress testing that have destabilized democracies elsewhere — rather than as a completed model. For practitioners working in development, civil society strengthening, and democratic governance programming, the lesson is a sobering one: consolidated democracies are not immune to backsliding, and the conditions that produce resilience must be actively maintained rather than assumed. For researchers, the Korean case now offers a rare and valuable natural experiment in how democratic institutions respond under maximum stress — and whether civil society mobilization, judicial independence, and legislative resistance are sufficient, on their own, to halt erosion once it has begun.