Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-04
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, korea
The global conversation about democratic decline has rarely been so urgent, yet its regional texture varies enormously. While Hungary, Turkey, and India have drawn sustained scholarly attention as case studies in authoritarian reversal, East Asia has occupied a more ambiguous place in the comparative politics literature. South Korea, in particular, has functioned as something of a theoretical anchor point — a society that completed a compressed but apparently durable transition from military dictatorship to liberal democracy in the late 1980s, and subsequently weathered multiple transfers of power, presidential impeachments, and civil society upheavals while remaining broadly within democratic norms. The question posed by this article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia — whether South Korea, once celebrated as a "poster child" of third-wave democratization, is now experiencing democratic backsliding — therefore carries weight far beyond any single national case. It touches on foundational assumptions in democratic theory, on regional security architectures, and on the moral authority of development assistance regimes that have long pointed to South Korea as proof that ODA and institutional support can produce durable democratic dividends.
The concept of democratic backsliding has evolved considerably in the scholarly literature over the past decade. Scholars including Nancy Bermeo, Steven Levitsky, and Lucan Way have shifted the analytical focus away from dramatic coups and toward subtler, incremental erosions: the weaponization of legal institutions against political opponents, the delegitimization of electoral processes and media, the expansion of executive prerogative at the expense of horizontal accountability, and the deliberate fragmentation of civil society. South Korea presents a complicated profile against these criteria. The country retains competitive elections, a constitutionally independent judiciary, and a vibrant if polarized civil society. At the same time, the presidency of Yoon Suk-yeol, which began in 2022, generated serious alarm among democratic watchdogs and Korean scholars alike. The December 2024 declaration of emergency martial law — the first such declaration in over forty years — was an extraordinary moment that crystallized long-building tensions over executive overreach, prosecutorial politicization, and the erosion of deliberative norms within the National Assembly. That the Constitutional Court moved to uphold impeachment proceedings against the president suggests that formal institutional safeguards retained meaningful force, but the episode revealed how thin the membrane between democratic governance and authoritarian temptation can become even in mature democracies.
Understanding this trajectory requires situating it within South Korea's distinctive political economy. The consolidation of South Korean democracy in the late 1980s and 1990s occurred alongside rapid economic modernization driven by export-led growth and a highly educated, urbanized population. Yet that same political economy generated structural tensions that have never been fully resolved: the entrenched power of the chaebol conglomerates and their complex relationships with state institutions; deep regional and generational cleavages within the electorate; and a prosecutorial and intelligence apparatus that retains considerable autonomy and a history of selective deployment against political rivals. These structural factors mean that democratic backsliding in South Korea, to the extent it is occurring, does not follow a simple populist template. It is less a story of a charismatic leader mobilizing mass sentiment against a liberal establishment, as in Hungary or Brazil, and more a story of elite-level institutional conflict in which democratic norms become casualties of factional struggle. This distinction matters enormously for comparative analysis, because it suggests that the diagnostic tools developed primarily from populist backsliding cases may require significant adaptation when applied to Northeast Asia.
The regional and global implications of South Korean democratic trajectory extend into development policy in ways that practitioners and donors should take seriously. For decades, South Korea's transition has been invoked — sometimes uncritically — as a template in ODA programming and conditionality frameworks. The "Korean model" has been cited by development institutions from the World Bank to the OECD DAC as evidence that the right combination of state capacity building, civil society engagement, and market integration produces democratic consolidation. If that model is now exhibiting significant stress fractures, it raises hard questions not only about the robustness of third-wave transitions generally but about the prescriptive conclusions development practitioners have drawn from the Korean experience. It also invites reflection on the role of external actors: the United States security alliance, international civil society networks, and transnational norm entrepreneurs all played roles in South Korea's democratic deepening, yet none of these external structures prevented the political convulsions of 2024. The limits of external democratic support — even when grounded in deep alliance relationships and sustained institutional engagement — deserve renewed analytical attention.
Looking forward, the South Korean case offers both cautionary lessons and, potentially, grounds for qualified optimism. The fact that constitutional institutions mobilized effectively against martial law, that mass civil society protest demonstrated considerable organizational capacity, and that the judicial process proceeded without military interference suggests that South Korea's democratic fabric has not been irreparably torn. But observers should resist the temptation to declare the crisis over simply because the most acute episode has passed. The deeper structural conditions — elite polarization, institutional weaponization, media fragmentation, and the unresolved tensions of a polarized political culture — remain. For researchers in development studies and comparative politics, the more productive frame may be to treat South Korea not as a case of backsliding that either succeeds or fails, but as a society navigating the chronic vulnerabilities that afflict all democracies in an era of concentrated economic inequality, information disorder, and geopolitical stress. The "poster child" framing was always a simplification; replacing it with more granular, institutionally attentive analysis is both an intellectual obligation and a precondition for the kinds of policy learning that ODA and civil society support programs require.