Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-05
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, korea
The question of whether South Korea's democracy is backsliding arrives at a moment of acute anxiety for scholars and practitioners who have long treated democratic consolidation as a largely irreversible process in industrialized, high-income societies. For decades, South Korea served as the paradigmatic example of a successful democratic transition embedded in rapid capitalist development — a country that dismantled an authoritarian developmental state, built robust electoral institutions, and emerged as a credible voice in multilateral forums on governance, human rights, and official development assistance. The title of this article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia — invoking the "poster child" — captures precisely the dissonance that observers now feel. When the countries once held up as proof of the democratic peace thesis begin to show symptoms of institutional deterioration, it is no longer possible to treat backsliding as exclusively a problem of the Global South or of states that never fully consolidated their transitions. The South Korean case forces a fundamental recalibration of how democratic theory, development studies, and ODA policy conceptualize resilience, regression, and the conditions under which gains are reversed.
The scholarly concept of democratic backsliding has evolved considerably since its earliest formulations. Earlier frameworks tended to focus on military coups, executive seizures of power, and abrupt regime ruptures — the dramatic collapses that dominated comparative politics in Latin America and Southeast Asia through the Cold War era. More recent scholarship, represented by figures such as Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, Nancy Bermeo, and Anna Grzymala-Busse, has shifted attention toward what Bermeo calls "executive aggrandizement" — the incremental erosion of checks and balances by democratically elected leaders who maintain electoral legitimacy while systematically weakening independent courts, the press, civil society, and parliamentary oversight. South Korea in the period under the Yoon Suk-yeol administration presents a case study that fits uneasily into either template. The extraordinary declaration of martial law in December 2024 — reversed within hours by a parliamentary vote — was neither a successful coup nor a routine democratic dispute. It represented an action without precedent in post-democratization Korean history, one that triggered a constitutional crisis, presidential impeachment proceedings, and a deepening polarization between conservative and progressive political blocs. The article under review in the Journal of Contemporary Asia appears positioned to assess whether these events constitute evidence of genuine backsliding or whether the institutional response — the rapid parliamentary reversal, the constitutional court process — demonstrates that Korean democracy retains sufficient structural integrity to absorb extraordinary stress.
For development scholars and ODA practitioners, the implications extend well beyond Korea's domestic politics. South Korea has, since the mid-2000s, positioned itself as a distinctive actor in international development cooperation — one that markets its own developmental trajectory as a transferable model under the rubric of the "Korean development experience." Through the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) and a broader ODA architecture, Seoul has promoted governance reforms, capacity-building programs, and democratization support across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, often framing these interventions with explicit reference to its own post-authoritarian transition. The credibility of this model depends substantially on the perceived quality of Korean democracy itself. If the "poster child" framing is now subject to serious academic interrogation — if a peer-reviewed article in a leading area-studies journal can genuinely ask whether Korea is backsliding — then the normative authority undergirding Korean development diplomacy is correspondingly weakened. Partner governments and recipient civil society organizations that have received Korean governance assistance will be watching how the constitutional crisis resolves, and what it reveals about the durability of the institutions Korea has been recommending to others.
The broader regional and global context matters here as well. South Korea's democratic stress occurs within a regional environment in which democratic institutions have been under sustained pressure across multiple polities. The Philippines under Duterte, Thailand's repeated cycles of military intervention, Myanmar's 2021 coup, and the incremental erosion of democratic norms in India under the BJP government all suggest that East and Southeast Asia presents a more contested democratic landscape than the "third wave" optimism of the 1990s and early 2000s would have predicted. Globally, the resurgence of illiberal populism — in Hungary, Poland, Brazil under Bolsonaro, and the United States — has produced a scholarly consensus that democratic backsliding is neither geographically confined nor structurally exceptional. The Korean case, however, carries particular analytical weight because Korea had achieved a level of democratic quality — measured by press freedom, judicial independence, civil society pluralism, and electoral integrity — that placed it well above regional averages and comparable to many established Western democracies. The depth from which it would be backsliding, if the diagnosis holds, is therefore greater, and the signal more alarming, than comparable episodes in countries where democratic consolidation was always more fragile.
From a research and policy standpoint, the article's intervention in the Journal of Contemporary Asia signals a growing willingness in area-studies scholarship to apply democratic backsliding frameworks rigorously to East Asian cases that had previously been treated as settled or exceptional. This matters methodologically. Much of the comparative democratization literature has been built on cases drawn from Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Sub-Saharan Africa; applying similar analytical lenses to Northeast Asian developmental states with strong civil societies, high levels of political participation, and deep integration into the liberal international order generates new theoretical puzzles. How much does economic development insulate democracies against backsliding? What is the role of polarization — ideological, generational, regional — in enabling or restraining executive overreach? Does a constitutionally empowered parliament, as South Korea demonstrated in December 2024, represent a sufficient institutional safeguard, or does the willingness of an executive to test such limits represent a qualitative deterioration that cannot simply be reset to zero once checked?
Looking forward, researchers and practitioners in the fields of democracy support, governance aid, and civil society development will need to engage seriously with the Korean case as it continues to unfold. The constitutional and electoral processes set in motion by the December 2024 crisis will produce data points — on judicial independence, media freedom, civil society mobilization, and electoral conduct — that will help determine whether Korea's institutions prove genuinely self-correcting or whether the crisis marks the beginning of a longer trajectory of erosion. For IOCSS and comparable research institutes, the analytical priority should be to move beyond binary assessments of "democracy" or "autocracy" and toward more granular, process-oriented analysis of which specific institutional domains are deteriorating, at what pace, and with what reversibility. The Korean case also underscores that democratic support programming in ODA contexts cannot be limited to developing-country partners; the diffuse effects of backsliding in donor countries — on ODA credibility, on multilateral norm-setting, and on the legitimacy of the liberal international order that ODA is implicitly designed to sustain — deserve far greater attention from the scholarly community than they have so far received.