Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-03
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, korea
For over three decades, South Korea has occupied a distinctive place in the global imagination of democratic development. Emerging from a prolonged period of military-led authoritarian rule, the country's transition to democracy following the June 1987 popular uprising became a reference point for scholars, development practitioners, and policymakers alike. Successive peaceful transfers of power, a vibrant civil society, a free press, and robust economic modernization earned the Republic of Korea the reputation as Asia's most compelling proof of concept — the so-called "poster child" of third-wave democratization. Yet the events of late 2024 and their turbulent aftermath have prompted a fundamental reassessment of that narrative. The declaration of martial law by President Yoon Suk-yeol in December 2024, swiftly challenged by the National Assembly and ultimately reversed within hours, followed by presidential impeachment proceedings and a constitutional crisis of the first order, has injected urgent new relevance into a question that many once considered settled: is South Korean democracy structurally resilient, or has it entered a trajectory of backsliding that mirrors troubling patterns elsewhere in the world? The article published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia engages this question at precisely the right historical moment.
The concept of democratic backsliding, as it has developed in the comparative politics literature over the past decade, refers not to the sudden collapse of democratic systems through military coup or revolutionary rupture, but rather to a gradual, incremental erosion of democratic norms, institutions, and practices — often carried out by leaders who themselves came to power through free elections. Scholars such as Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way have drawn careful distinctions between democratic breakdown and democratic erosion, arguing that the latter is more pervasive and more insidious precisely because it unfolds within the formal structures of constitutionalism while hollowing them out from within. What makes South Korea's recent experience analytically distinctive is that it defies easy categorization within this framework. The Yoon administration did not pursue the slow, procedurally camouflaged approach to power concentration that has characterized backsliding in Hungary under Viktor Orbán or Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Rather, the martial law episode represented a blunt, dramatic, and — crucially — unsuccessful attempt at executive overreach. That the National Assembly convened within hours to nullify the decree, and that constitutional mechanisms subsequently moved to remove the president from office, suggests that South Korea's democratic institutions retain significant autonomous capacity for self-defense. The question the Journal of Contemporary Asia article raises, implicitly or explicitly, is what this episode reveals about the underlying health of South Korean democracy: was the rapid institutional response evidence of resilience, or did the fact that martial law was attempted at all indicate deep vulnerabilities that persist beneath the surface?
To answer this question adequately requires situating South Korea's political dynamics within the broader structural context of its civil society and public sphere. South Korea's democracy has always been animated by an unusually mobilized citizenry. The candlelight protest movements of 2016 and 2017, which generated millions of peaceful demonstrators and led directly to the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye, remain the most vivid illustration of this civic energy. The same dynamic reasserted itself in the aftermath of the December 2024 martial law declaration. Civil society organizations, labor unions, professional associations, and citizens' groups moved quickly to occupy public space, coordinate pressure campaigns, and sustain visibility around constitutional processes. This pattern suggests that whatever institutional strains South Korean democracy faces at the elite level, the societal infrastructure of democratic accountability — the organized civic capacity to contest abuses of power — remains formidable. For development scholars and ODA practitioners who track civil society as an indicator of democratic consolidation, this distinction matters enormously. A democracy weakened at the level of executive behavior but defended vigorously from below represents a qualitatively different kind of challenge than one in which civil society itself has been co-opted, fragmented, or suppressed.
Nevertheless, the optimistic reading of institutional resilience should not occlude the genuine structural stresses that the South Korean political system has accumulated over the past decade. Executive-legislative polarization has intensified to a degree that renders normal governance increasingly dysfunctional. The prosecutorial system has been weaponized across successive administrations, with each incoming government deploying investigative apparatus against political opponents in ways that erode public confidence in the neutrality of state institutions. Media concentration and the subordination of major news organizations to corporate and political interests have narrowed the independent journalistic space upon which democratic accountability depends. The political economy of South Korea, still dominated by family-controlled conglomerates whose regulatory relationships with government create structural incentives for collusion, continues to generate the conditions under which democratic norms are selectively applied. These are not transient features of the Yoon period alone — they reflect systemic tendencies that have persisted across governments of both the progressive and conservative camps. If democratic backsliding is understood as a condition rather than a single event, South Korea's situation demands attention to these accumulating structural liabilities, not only to the dramatic episode of martial law.
The regional and global implications of South Korea's democratic trajectory extend well beyond the peninsula. South Korea has in recent years sought to project itself as a provider of development cooperation and democratic governance assistance, particularly within the broader Indo-Pacific strategic framework and through its engagement with multilateral development institutions. Its official development assistance program has grown substantially, and Seoul has positioned itself as a bridge between donor country experience and the particular development challenges of Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The credibility of this positioning rests in no small part on South Korea's own democratic standing. A South Korea perceived to be backsliding domestically is a less persuasive advocate for democratic governance conditionalities in its ODA relationships. This dynamic is not merely reputational; it has practical implications for the coherence of South Korean development policy and for the willingness of partner governments to engage with governance-related technical assistance. The democratic legitimacy of donor countries increasingly conditions the receptivity of recipients, and a South Korea whose poster-child status is in question becomes a more complicated interlocutor in those conversations.
Looking forward, the June 2025 presidential election and the return to government of the Democratic Party under Lee Jae-myung opens a new phase in South Korean political history, but it does not in itself resolve the underlying questions about democratic quality that the Journal of Contemporary Asia article engages. Competitive elections are a necessary but insufficient condition for democratic health. The deeper work of rebuilding institutional trust, depoliticizing the prosecutorial apparatus, reforming the regulatory framework governing media ownership, and restoring functional norms of executive-legislative cooperation will require sustained political will across multiple administrations and genuine engagement from civil society actors over many years. For researchers and practitioners in the fields of comparative democratization, ODA policy, and civil society development, South Korea in the post-Yoon period constitutes a critical natural experiment: a democracy that survived a significant stress test, but whose post-crisis trajectory will determine whether the poster-child narrative can be meaningfully rehabilitated or must be permanently qualified. The scholarly attention that the Journal of Contemporary Asia brings to this question is timely and consequential, and it signals the importance of sustained, empirically grounded analysis of a country whose democratic experience the world has too often taken for granted.