Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-07-11
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, korea
South Korea has long occupied a privileged position in comparative democratization scholarship. Emerging from decades of military-led authoritarian rule and achieving a peaceful democratic transition in 1987, the country became a canonical reference point for theorists of democratic consolidation. Its combination of rapid economic development, robust civil society mobilization, and institutional maturation seemed to confirm that democracy, once consolidated in a high-income East Asian state, would prove durable. The country's experience with the 2016–2017 candlelight movement — in which millions of citizens peacefully demanded and secured the removal of President Park Geun-hye through constitutional impeachment — further reinforced the image of South Korean democracy as self-correcting and resilient. Against this background, the question posed by the article under review in the Journal of Contemporary Asia carries particular weight: what has happened to the poster child?
The answer, as the article's framing implies, is deeply unsettling. The December 2024 declaration of martial law by President Yoon Suk-yeol represented an extraordinary rupture in South Korean constitutional life. Whatever one's assessment of the legal and political context surrounding that declaration, the invocation of emergency military powers by a democratically elected executive to circumvent a hostile legislature struck at the foundational norms of liberal democratic governance. That the declaration was rapidly reversed and followed by a second successful presidential impeachment demonstrated certain institutional reflexes remained operative. Yet the very occurrence of such an event — inconceivable under most academic models of consolidated democracy applied to South Korea — forces a reassessment of the frameworks through which the country's democratic health has been evaluated. The article engages this reassessment directly, situating South Korea within the now extensive literature on democratic backsliding and asking whether what unfolded represents a temporary aberration or a structural deterioration.
Democratic backsliding, as conceptualized by scholars such as Nancy Bermeo, Steven Levitsky, and Lucan Way, does not necessarily take the form of dramatic military coups or overnight authoritarian reversions. More commonly it proceeds through incremental executive aggrandizement, the erosion of horizontal accountability mechanisms, the weaponization of state institutions against political opponents, and the deliberate polarization of the electorate to delegitimize opposition. Analysts who have examined the Yoon administration have noted patterns consistent with these tendencies: the deployment of prosecutorial powers in ways that critics characterized as politically targeted, growing tensions between the executive and constitutional oversight bodies, and a rhetorical posture that frequently framed political disagreement in terms of subversion and anti-state activity. Whether these tendencies cross the threshold into genuine backsliding or remain within the range of competitive political hardball is a judgment the article appears to take seriously, resisting both alarmist and complacent readings. What makes the South Korean case analytically valuable is precisely its ambiguity — the institutional guardrails held, but they were tested in ways that few observers anticipated.
The regional and global context matters enormously for interpreting these developments. South Korea's democratic struggles unfold against a backdrop of sustained democratic recession across East and Southeast Asia, with the Philippines under Duterte and subsequently Marcos exhibiting consolidated populist authoritarianism, Thailand remaining under military-influenced governance, and Myanmar having experienced a devastating military coup in 2021. Within this regional landscape, South Korea and Taiwan have functioned as anchor democracies, their trajectories watched carefully by civil society actors, donor governments, and international organizations invested in democratic norms. Simultaneously, the global democratic recession documented by Freedom House and V-Dem indices has demonstrated that no income level or developmental achievement immunizes a polity against backsliding. Hungary, Poland, Israel, and the United States itself have all registered significant democratic deterioration by various indicators in recent years, fundamentally challenging the assumption that consolidation is a terminal condition rather than a continuing process. South Korea's experience thus contributes a crucial data point to the broader argument that democratic resilience requires ongoing maintenance rather than passive inheritance.
For ODA practitioners and civil society researchers, the South Korean case carries specific implications that extend well beyond academic classification debates. South Korea is itself a significant donor country — one whose remarkable transformation from aid recipient to aid provider has been heavily narrated through a democratic development lens. The Korea International Cooperation Agency has promoted South Korea's developmental experience as a model for partner countries, and democratic governance has featured prominently in that narrative. Episodes of executive overreach at home complicate that positioning and raise questions about the coherence of democratic conditionality in Korean foreign assistance. More broadly, the case underscores the importance of investing in the institutional substrates of democracy — judicial independence, legislative capacity, civil society autonomy, and media pluralism — rather than treating electoral competitiveness as a sufficient indicator of democratic health. South Korean civil society demonstrated remarkable mobilizing capacity in response to the martial law declaration, and that capacity was built over decades of investment in associational life. Donor programs that similarly prioritize long-term institutional and civic capacity development, rather than short-cycle electoral observation, may be better positioned to support democratic resilience in partner countries.
Looking forward, South Korean democracy faces a period of significant uncertainty. The post-impeachment political environment will test whether institutional recalibration can address the underlying polarization and governance dysfunctions that created conditions for executive overreach. For researchers, the case reopens foundational questions about the conditions under which democratic consolidation can be reliably declared, and whether the field's dominant frameworks — many developed in the 1990s and early 2000s — require updating for a moment characterized by simultaneous democratic stress across varied regime types and developmental contexts. For practitioners, the lessons are more proximate: even the most celebrated democratic success stories require sustained attention, and the poster children of one era can become the cautionary tales of the next. Whether South Korean democracy ultimately demonstrates renewed resilience or continued deterioration, its trajectory will be essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the future of democracy in the twenty-first century.