Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-06-27
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, korea
South Korea has long occupied a singular place in the comparative study of democratic transitions. Emerging from decades of military-backed authoritarianism and the brutal suppression of pro-democracy movements, the country's 1987 democratic breakthrough came to be celebrated in academic and policy circles alike as one of the most successful cases of Third Wave democratization. For more than three decades, scholars of political development pointed to Seoul as evidence that rapid industrialization, a vibrant civil society, and strategic international engagement could together produce durable democratic institutions even in the absence of long liberal traditions. That foundational assumption is now under serious strain. The question posed in this article from the Journal of Contemporary Asia — whether South Korea is experiencing democratic backsliding — reflects a broader unease within the comparative politics community about the resilience of even consolidated democracies. The South Korean case matters not only for what it reveals about the fragility of democratic norms in one country, but for what it implies about the global trajectory of liberal governance at a moment when authoritarian alternatives are attracting renewed interest from governments across the developing world.
The dramatic events of late 2024 brought this question into sharp relief. President Yoon Suk-yeol's declaration of martial law in December of that year — an act without precedent in the modern democratic republic — triggered a constitutional crisis of the first order. The National Assembly acted swiftly to revoke the decree, exercising precisely the institutional check that democratic architects had designed for such moments. Yet the fact that a sitting president could invoke emergency rule, even briefly, against an opposition-controlled legislature exposed how susceptible South Korea's democratic institutions remain to executive overreach when political polarization is sufficiently intense. Yoon's subsequent impeachment by the National Assembly and the Constitutional Court's confirmation of that removal in 2025 demonstrated that South Korea's institutional guardrails held in the immediate crisis, but the episode left a residue of legitimacy questions that a single election cannot fully resolve. The article under review arrives at a moment when scholars must grapple with a paradox: a democracy that survived its most severe test in a generation may nonetheless have sustained structural damage that will take years to diagnose accurately.
Democratic backsliding, as the comparative politics literature has increasingly emphasized, rarely takes the form of a sudden coup or the overnight abolition of elections. The more common pattern, documented across Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and numerous other cases, is a gradual erosion of institutional norms, a narrowing of civil society space, a weaponization of prosecutorial and regulatory bodies against political opponents, and a steady degradation of press independence. South Korea exhibited several of these warning signs even before the martial law episode. Civil society organizations critical of the Yoon administration reported increasing friction from regulatory authorities, and investigative journalists faced a more adversarial legal environment. The ideological polarization between the ruling conservative bloc and the opposition Democratic Party intensified to a degree that made routine legislative governance nearly impossible, with the National Assembly becoming a site of near-permanent procedural conflict rather than deliberative policymaking. For scholars working within the framework of democratic erosion advanced by Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way or the "autocratization" research agenda developed by the V-Dem Institute, these patterns constitute more than mere political turbulence; they represent identifiable movement along a continuum whose endpoint, if unchecked, is competitive authoritarianism.
The implications of the South Korean trajectory extend well beyond the peninsula. As a member of the OECD and a major bilateral donor under the Korea International Cooperation Agency framework, South Korea has positioned its own democratic development experience as a model for recipient countries across Southeast Asia and Africa. The ODA community has taken seriously the so-called Korean development model precisely because it seemed to demonstrate that economic growth, institutional capacity, and democratic governance could be achieved in tandem. If South Korea's democracy is now visibly contested — not merely as a matter of academic debate but as a lived political reality observed by policymakers in Nairobi, Phnom Penh, and Accra — the normative persuasiveness of that model is diminished. Development practitioners have long debated whether democracy can be meaningfully transmitted through aid conditionality or institutional assistance programs, but the soft power dimension of example-setting has generally been underappreciated. A South Korea navigating its own democratic vulnerabilities is a less credible advocate for governance reform in its partner countries, and this erosion of symbolic capital deserves attention from the international development community.
From a research perspective, the South Korean case challenges scholars to refine their analytical frameworks for measuring democratic resilience. Countries like South Korea — with high per capita income, strong civil society traditions, competitive elections, and internationally integrated economies — were long considered largely immune to serious democratic erosion. The events of 2024 and 2025 complicate that comfortable assumption and demand closer examination of the specific institutional features that either accelerate or retard backsliding in mature democracies. The role of concentrated executive power, the vulnerability of independent prosecutors and media to political pressure, and the capacity of legislative bodies to serve as genuine counterweights are all variables that comparative politics must now assess with fresh urgency. For practitioners engaged in democratic governance programs, the lesson may be that support for institutional resilience — parliamentary capacity building, judicial independence, and civil society funding — must be sustained even in countries previously classified as consolidated democracies. South Korea is unlikely to complete a full authoritarian turn; its civil society, opposition parties, and constitutional court have all demonstrated significant capacity for resistance. But the question the Journal of Contemporary Asia article implicitly poses — whether the poster child has faded — deserves an honest answer: South Korea's democracy remains real, competitive, and partially self-correcting, yet it has proven more fragile than its admirers once believed, and that fragility is now a permanent feature of how scholars, donors, and practitioners must understand it going forward.