Democratization and Social Movements in South Korea: Defiant Institutionalization by Sun-Chul Kim

Author:Sun-Chul Kim [Kim, Sun-Chul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ethnic Studies, Democracy, Political Ideologies, Social Science, Political Science, Regional Studies, General
ISBN: 9781317282884
Google: 4C1-CwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 28967814
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

The paralysis in party politics

The 1987 transition opened up ample room for the party system to flourish as a key institution articulating public interest and mediating social conflict. However, South Korean political parties failed to take advantage of the new political climate. Instead, the party system became “even more incoherent and unstable,” “fragmented and disorderly” in post-authoritarian South Korea (Kim, B-K. 2000: 56). The weakness of South Korean political parties was rooted in a tradition of a strong, coherent state centered on a powerful executive with a weak, amorphous party system as its subsidiary. Under authoritarian politics, the purpose of political parties was not to represent citizen interests and demands but to serve the autocratic ruler. The rulers created various means to restrict the activities of political opponents and political parties. These measures ranged from the outright use of mob terror and political bans to a set of laws aimed at stifling any sense of dissent. The National Security Law, in particular, proved to be the magic wand to autocratic rulers, as it allowed rulers to paint any opponent a threat to national security and punish them accordingly. For example, Syngman Rhee closed down the Progressive Party in 1958 and hanged its leader Cho Bong Am in 1959 citing the National Security Law. Cho Bong Am had competed with the incumbent Syngman Rhee in the 1956 presidential election and the Progressive Party had been expanding its support base, posing a threat to Syngman Rhee’s autocratic rule (Cumings 1997: 343).

The Progressive Party incident sent out a grave warning to potential challengers in the political sphere, and set the stage for docile opposition parties into the mid-1980s. However, the fact that South Korean opposition parties were not so different from ruling parties in terms of their historical roots or ideology was partly responsible for their docility. The lineage of the opposition parties in the early 1990s, such as the PPD or the DP, can be traced back to the Korean Democratic Party (KDP; Hanmindang) in the mid-1940s and the New Democratic Party (Sinmindang) in the 1960s and 1970s. These parties

drew their key membership from essentially the same pool of landowners, businessmen, bureaucrats, and professionals who had formed the core of the late colonial social elite and who had never had shown much inclination or ability to develop genuine grass-roots political support and organizations.

(Eckert et al. 1990: 352)

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