Evaluating South Korea's democratic backsliding
Evaluating
South Korea's
democratic backsliding
WRITTEN BY DR MI-SON KIM
6 September 2023
Park Geun-hye, who was elected president in 2012, is in many ways a notable politician in South Korea. She was the country's first female president and the first — and so far the only — president to have been impeached. Found guilty of abuse of power and corruption, she was unanimously removed from office by the Constitutional Court of Korea on 10 March 2017.
This was a remarkable event in South Korean politics, not only because the impeachment was unprecedented but also because it was preceded by five months of candlelight protests in which several million citizens participated to demand Park's removal from office. The 2016-2017 candlelight protests — the largest demonstrations in modern Korean history — attracted global attention for their scale, longevity, peaceful nature, and the significance of their outcome.
Although many have lauded the entire episode as evidence of democratic consolidation in South Korea, the political scandal surrounding President Park and her subsequent impeachment also exposed several chronic problems facing South Korean democracy, such as intensifying ideological and partisan polarisation, concentration of power in the presidency, and close ties between government and business.
Subsequent Korean administrations under Moon Jae-in and Yoon Suk-yeol have struggled to address these problems and, in some cases, have even exacerbated them. While South Korea's democracy cannot be considered as backsliding yet, an ever-widening ideological and partisan divide among the public and politicians, marked by President Yoon's recent comments describing the opposition as "anti-state forces", shows that this trend is far from over.
Strong presidency versus weak legislature
Park Geun-hye's presidency confirmed the imbalanced nature of power in South Korean politics — the legislature remains weak and unable to effectively check the executive. Although all South Korean presidents have generally enjoyed a dominant position in their relationship and interaction with the legislature, Park’s administration was particularly marked by a lack of communication with, and responsiveness to, opposition parties, unwillingness to negotiate and make concessions, and unilateral decision-making.
The current state of South Korean politics suggests that the country is at a critical moment that could determine its fate: democratic backsliding or consolidation.
For example, when many of her policy initiatives, such as economic stimulus bills (number one on her government's agenda) and five amendments to the Labour Reform Act and the Service Industry Development Act, were blocked by opposition parties in the National Assembly, she did not attempt to meet with opposition party leaders to persuade them or find a compromise.
Instead, she simply ignored any political opposition and used her power to make unilateral decisions, as evidenced by her veto of the bipartisan bill to revise the National Assembly Act in June 2015, accompanied by scathing criticism of both her own Saenuri Party and the opposition parties for "overstepping their boundaries and neglecting their duties".
Park had previously vetoed another bill to amend the National Assembly Act, making two vetoes during her tenure. This is unusual because, since the country’s democratic transition in 1988, it has been extremely rare for South Korean presidents to veto bills. Her vetoes not only prevented the bills from becoming law but also forced the floor leader of the Saenuri Party, Yoo Seung-min, to resign from his leadership position because Park explicitly blamed him for the bill's passage in the National Assembly during her June 2015 veto.
Another example is that of Park’s cabinet appointments: she disregarded the opposition parties' objections to 11 of her cabinet appointments, a significant number considering there have only been a total of 25 cases of a president approving appointments despite the opposition parties' objections since 2005 when cabinet appointment hearings were adopted. Unfortunately, there is no institutional tool for the legislature to stop the president from acting unilaterally.
President Moon Jae-in, who took office after Park's impeachment in 2017, understood that the fundamental cause of the 2016-2017 candlelight protests and subsequent presidential impeachment was unbridled presidential power and the failure of the legislature to check the presidency. He pledged to relinquish imperial presidential power and to work together with the National Assembly, making an effort to build a robust partnership. However, by allying too closely with the ruling Democratic Party and claiming to form a joint party-legislature-executive government, President Moon ironically weakened the National Assembly's function as a check on the presidency and alienated other parties in the Assembly.
The current president, Yoon Suk-yeol, also has a unilateral leadership style, pushing through his policy initiatives despite objections and going toe-to-toe with his opponents. Although he has only been in office for slightly over a year, it is safe to say that so far President Yoon has not reduced the dominance of the presidency in South Korean politics. On the contrary, he has appointed former prosecutors to key positions in his government in an attempt to expand presidential power, leading critics to dub his administration a "prosecutor's republic".
The Supreme Prosecutor's Office is deeply involved in Korean politics, especially because it has been used by Korean presidents to block and punish their political opposition along with the National Intelligence Service (even after the country's democratisation). Indeed, the Yoon administration has issued the highest number of executive orders, especially in cooperation with the Minister of Justice Han Dong-hoon, a former prosecutor, to circumvent the legislative process of the National Assembly.
Polarisation and hyper-partisanship
V-Dem Institute's political polarisation index suggests that South Korean politics has become more polarised since 2013 when the Park Geun-hye administration took office. The country’s polarisation score remained unchanged during the Moon administration but reached a new high after Yoon took office in 2023. In addition to the presence of a strong presidency, which is increasingly unchecked by the weak legislature, personalist politics is another important reason for the mounting polarisation.
South Korean politics has long been described as personalistic rather than party based or ideological programme-driven. Personalist political systems driven by the aura or popularity of big-name politicians tend to be more emotional or affective and divisive than party or ideology based politics. President Park Geun-hye cemented and intensified this pattern.
By making several controversial decisions in 2016, such as closing the Kaesong Industrial Complex (a symbol of inter-Korean cooperation) in response to North Korea's nuclear and missile tests and deploying the US Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system, Park Geun-hye further divided Korean society. Her administration, together with the conservative Saenuri Party, portrayed the liberal opposition as pro-North leftists and maintained an extensive blacklist of openly critical celebrities and cultural figures, denying them state funding and effectively restricting their activities.
Her presidency united conservatives while alienating and antagonising liberals. Park's continuously high approval ratings, which were above 50 per cent for the first two years of her presidency and remained above 30-40 per cent until the 2016-2017 candlelight protests and her impeachment, can be attributed to her core supporters. Her ardent fans remained loyal despite serious incidents such as her mishandling of the aftermath of the sinking of the Sewol ferry, which killed over 300 people, mostly high school students on their way from Incheon to Jeju for a field trip, which demonstrated her leadership and governance failures.
Although President Moon Jae-in promised to unite the people and heal the society torn apart by Park's political downfall, he failed to make any tangible improvements. Moon’s government and the liberal Democratic Party continued to use hostile rhetoric against the conservative opposition, such as calling them "pro-Japanese forces" to delegitimise their disapproval of Moon's tough approach to relations with Japan. Such a hyper-partisan and 'us-versus-them' approach has continued, if not intensified, during the Yoon Suk-yeol administration, as evidenced by his oft-quoted phrase describing the liberal opposition as "pinko or pro-North Korean commies" and publicly stating that they were not someone he would talk to.
In addition to their hostile rhetoric, the Moon and Yoon administrations also habitually harass(ed) the opposition, demonstrating the contentious nature of politics and partisan polarisation in South Korea in recent years. President Moon, for example, made the fight against "accumulated evils" a priority of his government, specifically targeting the two previous conservative presidents — Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye.
Similarly, President Yoon is using coercive state apparatuses such as the police, prosecutors, and the Board of Audit and Inspection to punish members of the former Moon administration and the Democratic Party. Yoon's focus on attacking and blaming the Moon administration and its policies at every opportunity has been described by political pundits as "Anything but Moon (ABM)".
Lessons not learned
Former President Park Geun-hye’s impeachment exposed South Korea's democratic shortcomings, including but not limited to the concentration of power in the presidency, the underdevelopment of representative institutions, polarisation, and political volatility. Unfortunately, instead of addressing these problems, successive administrations have only exacerbated these problems. Given the persistent weakness of the National Assembly and political parties, Korean people have been increasingly relying on non-institutional channels of representation, such as protests and demonstrations, making politics more contentious and volatile.
Popular dissatisfaction with the existing political system breeds mistrust of the political establishment, making the system more vulnerable to the rise of populist leaders and leading people to be more tolerant of undemocratic behaviour by politicians as long as they are seen as competent. The election of President Yoon Suk-yeol in 2022, who was not a politician but a prosecutor throughout his career, should be understood in this context, similar to the election of President Donald Trump in the US in 2016. Indeed, the current state of South Korean politics suggests that the country is at a critical moment that could determine its fate: democratic backsliding or consolidation.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Dr Mi-son Kim is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Texas, USA. Her research focuses on party and electoral systems, public opinion and participation, campaigns and elections, and democratic development, with a regional focus on East Asian politics and US politics. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Iowa in 2015. Image credit: Flickr/Ken Shin.