Korean Studies of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019. xii, 201 pp. (Tables, figures.) US$30.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-295-74547-3.
In the midst of democratic setbacks in Asia and many other parts of the world, the 2016–2017 Candlelight Revolution in South Korea (hereafter Korea) received international attention and praise for having shown the world “how democracy is done” by ousting a president, one that allegedly violated the constitution, in a legal and peaceful manner. In Top-Down Democracy in South Korea, Erik Mobrand reveals to us that “an active civil society should not be interpreted simply as a sign of a healthy democracy; rather, civil society can also be a symptom of the separation of activism from party politics” (95). Indeed, Korea has been hailed as a successful third-wave democracy and has gained a reputation for having a strong, vibrant civil society. At the same time, Korea is infamous for a weak party system that lowers political participation among its citizens. This juxtaposition of a hyperdeveloped civil society and an underdeveloped party system poses challenges to a representative democracy. Top-Down Democracy in South Korea enables us to better understand and evaluate Korea’s democracy by explaining how the political elite have remained in power without developing institutions for mass representation.
According to Mobrand, Korea’s top-down democracy is built on exclusionary political institutions that deliberately hinder mass representation. The origin of this anti-participatory nature of Korea’s institutional politics is argued to be found in the “1963 system” from the authoritarian era that significantly impacted the “broad ideals related to democracy and the role of elections in it” (10). Judges, legislators, and election officials propagated an official “electoral ethos” that voter-politician interaction is susceptible to corruption and should be limited. In propagating this ethos, the new Political Parties Act, the laws on campaigning, the election commission, and Article 13 of the constitution dictated how parties should organize, how members could participate in party activities, and many other aspects of party life. In essence, the 1963 system discouraged local organizing and encouraged national organizing for votes, thereby limiting electoral mobilization and the electoral sphere by advantaging ruling parties and disciplining opposition parties. Mobrand argues that the institutions and ethos of the 1963 system, conceived under Park Chung-hee’s authoritarian rule (1961–1979), were revived and perpetuated in the post-authoritarian period by the state and party elites. Although elections became freer and fairer compared to previous elections under authoritarian rule, major parties continued to remain as managers of elections by excluding or absorbing minor parties and political outsiders rather than becoming mass participatory organizations that engaged in grassroots mobilization.
In illustrating his argument, Mobrand shows that during the initial liberalization of 1987–1988, the ruling and in-office opposition parties used existing electoral institutions from the 1963 system to limit the electoral power of the chaeya activists who pioneered the minjung movement which challenged authoritarian rule in the 1980s. Three factors in particular—politicized regionalism that parties used to win elections, top-down control over candidate nominations by party bosses, and rigid legal regulations that embraced the electoral ethos of the 1963 system—are identified to have perpetuated the exclusionary forms of party politics in the 1990s. There was a brief “participatory moment” in the early 2000s that coincided with Roh Moo-hyun’s ascendancy to the presidency, which directly challenged the abovementioned three pillars of the 1990s. However, reforms from the participatory era failed to institutionalize, while state and main parties operating under the successive administrations of Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye responded by strengthening legal control over political parties, party leadership control over balloting, and state interventions in electoral politics beyond the 1963 system.
While Mobrand shows when and how the state and major parties used state institutions to propagate oligopoly before and after democratization, a more clearly distinguished discussion of formal and informal institutions and their overlapping or diverging roles and impacts on party governance and electoral mobilization would have enhanced readers’ understanding of how this vicious cycle is maintained. It would have also been helpful if the author had provided more information and data on (reduced) citizen participation in politics and how citizens are directly impacted by the reforms and regulations implemented by the state and legislators. How much is the public aware of changes to the laws and regulations surrounding parties and elections? How do Korean citizens conceptualize parties and elections? More discussion and examination of citizens’ views regarding how and why they feel disempowered and disengaged would further bolster the author’s argument that Korea indeed is a “top-down democracy” with anti-participatory parties and elections.
Nevertheless, through an in-depth examination of Korea’s democracy, Erik Mobrand’s Top-Down Democracy in South Korea contributes to the growing literature on democratic consolidation by highlighting the anti-participatory nature of parties and elections that challenges the deepening of a representative democracy in countries like South Korea. The study also challenges the widely-held view that Korea’s political party system is weak by demonstrating that “the lack of institutionalization was not from party weakness but from the strength of party labels,” cultivated through “their control in the legislature over rules governing parties and elections” (86). As Mobrand points out, Korean political parties can be considered “weak only if they are understood as mass organizations and agents of representation” (13). This impacts how we conceptualize and measure democracy and the role that elections play in democracy, especially in new democracies where elections have existed (and, to some extent, have been free and fair) under authoritarianism. We are particularly challenged to pay more attention to the entire electoral process, including party regulations and practices, rather than focusing heavily on the elections themselves. As such, Mobrand’s study not only provides an explanation of why Korea’s top-down democracy is the way it is, but also generates questions for future research on authoritarian legacies, democratic consolidation, and varieties of democracy. Top-Down Democracy in South Korea, thus, should be of interest to those who want to better understand Korea’s democracy as well as the challenges of deepening a democracy from a comparative perspective.
Joan E. Cho
Wesleyan University, Middletown, USA