How South Korea’s Authoritarian Past Shapes Its Democracy

Deep political polarization and an underdeveloped party system – coupled with powerful social movements – have been identified as “flawed” aspects of South Korea’s democracy. These factors are, in fact, authoritarian legacies. When democracy is built on indigenous political traditions and pre-existing conditions – such as an authoritarian past – it is bound to take different forms and become “differently democratic.” Authoritarian legacies have lasting effects on people’s attitudes and behavior even decades after a country becomes a democracy. As such, we cannot expect the party system and social movements in South Korea to behave like those in democracies that have not experienced authoritarianism or experienced different forms of authoritarian rule.

Political polarization, divided along generational lines, is a threat to South Korea’s democracy, but it’s also an authoritarian legacy that lives on through those who have been directly and indirectly impacted by the authoritarian past. It is important to understand that it is not just the country’s history of authoritarianism but also people’s varying experiences of authoritarianism that contribute to the workings of – and challenges to – democracy in the country. Just as in South Korea, where understanding generational differences could help illuminate ways of bringing people together, understanding each country’s legacy is key to helping support healthy democracies worldwide.

The State of Democracy in South Korea

Lately, many democracies around the world, including the United States, have been under threat. South Korea, dubbed as one of the most successful “third-wave democracies,” seemed to have defied the global trend of democratic backsliding when in 2016-2017 approximately 15.87 million South Koreans (nearly a third of the country’s population) were involved in a series of peaceful candlelight protests that led to the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye. She was found to be corrupt, unjust, and undemocratic.

The international community praised the movement and South Korea’s vibrant civil society for showing the world “how democracy is done,” as one commentary in the Washington Post put it. However, the fierce counter-mobilization by the far right – who believed that the anti-Park forces were North Korean sympathizers trying to take over the country – revealed deep political polarization plaguing South Korea’s then 30-year-old democracy.

In addition to the political division that surfaced in the protests surrounding Park’s impeachment, the scale and impact of the 2016-2017 Candlelight Revolution affirmed a reoccurring pattern in Korean politics: powerful protest movements – instead of the National Assembly (South Korea’s unicameral legislature) – being the first mover in bringing about major political changes. Other examples include (but are not limited to) the 1960 April Revolution that overthrew Syngman Rhee’s corrupt government, the 1987 June Democratic Uprising that ended authoritarian rule, the 1987 Great Workers Struggle that resulted in labor law reforms, the 1996-1997 Workers’ General Strike that led to yet another amendment of labor laws, and the candlelight protest against the impeachment of President Roh Moo-hyun in 2004, which contributed to the landslide victory of Roh’s Uri Party during the national legislative elections and the dismissal of the impeachment case by the Constitutional Court. Such a pattern arguably reflects the weaknesses of South Korea’s representative democracy, which is marked by a hyperactive civil society and a weakly institutionalized political party system.

Authoritarian Roots of Powerful Social Movements 

To understand these features of South Korea’s democracy and its origins, we need to turn to the country’s authoritarian past. In my forthcoming book, “Seeds of Mobilization: The Authoritarian Roots of South Korea’s Democracy,” I show that, in the short term, economic growth provided performance legitimacy and helped stabilize authoritarian rule, as reflected in increased electoral support for the dictators’ ruling parties. However, in the long term, the industrial and education policies that the autocrats pursued to achieve economic growth also worked toward ending their rule by facilitating the development of the pro-democracy movement.

The autocrats’ development of industrial complexes and expansion of tertiary education resulted in the geospatial concentration of workers and students who were otherwise scattered across different parts of the country and disconnected from each other. Such dense concentration – and the ecological conditions surrounding these industrial complexes and college campuses – facilitated the formation of horizontal linkages within and across social groups. These ties not only increased their capacity to organize and engage in collective action but ultimately helped spread anti-regime protests throughout the country.

It was only after these horizontal linkages were formed that we witnessed the first nationwide labor struggle (the 1987 Great Workers’ Struggle). It involved workers from most major industries, including the heavy chemical industry workers, who largely remained acquiescent throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. Similarly, the student movement meaningfully expanded to provincial areas across the country – beyond the elite universities in Seoul (Seoul National, Korea, and Yonsei Universities) and other so-called movement-prone universities (such as Chonnam and Kyungpook National Universities). These linkages were built over the course of decades, and predictably, the decades-long processes that resulted in the democratic transition did not simply end with the transition; rather, they would have lingering effects in the democratic period.

The Authoritarian Roots of a Weakly Institutionalized Party System

What explains the weakly institutionalized party system in democratic South Korea? As explained in Yoonkyung Lee’s recent book, “Between the Streets and the Assembly: Social Movements, Political Parties, and Democracy in Korea,” because the authoritarian regime in South Korea was personalist rather than party-based, neither the ruling party nor the opposition parties developed into stable organizations with clear programmatic positions. The weakness of political parties was reinforced in the democratic period, when parties relied on regional appeals (as opposed to clearly articulated policy agendas) as a method of mobilizing votes.

In his contributing chapter to “Party System Institutionalization in Asia: Democracies, Autocracies, and the Shadows of the Past,” Joseph Wong adds the economic factor to the discussion. The fact that the democratic transition occurred during relative “good economic times,” Wong argues, not only allowed the ruling party to stay in power but also permitted ideological fluidity and flexibility in the political system, which undermined the development of salient political cleavages in South Korea’s political party system.

Moreover, as pointed out by Jang-Jip Choi, right-wing authoritarianism left a long-lasting impact on the political left, and political ideology has been confined to the right spectrum, limiting parties’ ability to compete on qualitatively distinct ideologies and programs. In these ways, authoritarian legacies help explain why political parties failed to expand their social bases and channel various interests in representative politics and why South Korean citizens would instead turn to social movement organizations and street protests to articulate their political demands.

Varying Experiences of Authoritarianism and the Generational Divides 

In addition to the time-varying effects that economic development had on authoritarian resilience, my research also shows that each generation’s varying formative experiences (or lack thereof) of economic growth and authoritarian rule are translated into generational differences in political attitudes and behavior in the democratic period (such as political ideology, civic engagement, and attitudes toward North Korea and the United States).

South Korea’s so-called “386 (or 586) generation” refers to people in their 30s (when the term was coined; now their 50s) who entered colleges and universities in the 1980s and who were born in the ‘60s. This generation actively participated in the pro-democracy movement against U.S.-supported right-wing authoritarian rule in the 1980s and brought about democratization through their protest efforts.

South Koreans who are older than the 386 generation (“pre-386 generations”) were born during tumultuous times, when the majority of the population was affected by absolute poverty from Japanese colonial rule and the Korean War – before the “economic miracle” that began under Park Chung-hee’s military dictatorship. In contrast, the “post-386 generations” were born during a period of economic prosperity with almost no experience of authoritarian rule.

Studies have shown that those belonging to the pre-386 generation, and especially those who believe in prioritizing economic development over democracy, are more likely to demonstrate political nostalgia for Park Chung-hee. Using Asia Barometer Survey data from the democratic period (2003-2015), I found that, overall, even in the democratic period, economic development was considered more important than democracy across all generations in South Korea, with 50 percent to 70.6 percent of each generation holding that view.

That said, the degree to which economic development was considered more important than democracy changes starting with the 386 generation: The proportion of respondents who consider economic development to be somewhat more important than democracy is larger than those who regarded economic development to be definitely more important than democracy. The pattern is reversed for the pre-386 generations.

Only the youngest generation – the first to be born after the democratic transition – has a distinctly higher proportion of respondents who consider democracy to be more important than economic development. These findings suggest that people’s differing experiences (or lack thereof) of economic development and authoritarianism continue to impact their political attitudes and behavior, and they themselves reflect authoritarian legacies in South Korean democracy.

Generational Divides and Political Polarization

These legacies persist and contribute to political polarization in South Korean society. The tension between the liberal and conservative segments of Korean society was particularly evident following the 2012 election of Park Chung-hee’s daughter, Park Geun-hye, as president. She had been the candidate of the conservative Saenuri Party, an “authoritarian successor party” of Park Chung-hee’s Democratic Republican Party, and she explicitly aimed to rule as her father had. Her campaign slogan, “Let’s Try to Live Well Again,” even directly referenced her father’s slogan from the New Village Movement in the 1970s, “Let’s Try to Live Well.”

Then, as the end of Park’s five-year term drew near in 2016-2017, she became embroiled in a scandal involving corruption, bribery, and abuse of power. Millions of South Korean citizens participated in the aforementioned candlelight protests to protect South Korea’s democracy. In response, hundreds of thousands of senior citizens (mostly in their 60s and 70s) launched a series of pro-Park Taegukgi (Korean national flag) rallies, demanding the arrest of the candlelight protestors, whom they deemed as pro-North Korean leftists threatening South Korea’s democracy.

In this context, we can understand why Park Geun-hye was such a polarizing force: To some, her 2012 presidential win represented the re-emergence of conservative forces, and to others, it represented the authoritarian legacy.

That legacy lives beyond Park Geun-hye and her impeachment. Taegukgi rallies continued throughout the progressive Moon Jae-in government (2017-2022) and even in front of Moon’s retirement residence in Yangsan, South Gyeongsang province, with pictures of Park Chung-hee and Park Geun-hye and posters labeling Moon as a “traitor.” As president, Moon declared that “the new government will maintain the spirit of the candlelight revolution” and vowed to restore South Korea’s democracy by eradicating “deep-rooted evils” committed by the conservative administrations that preceded his own. As pointed out by Gi-Wook Shin in his 2020 article in the Journal of Democracy, this all-out campaign by Moon’s government further sharpened political polarization in the country.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the newly-elected conservative president, Yoon Suk-yeol – a former top prosecutor with a track record of indicting corrupt politicians (including Park Geun-hye and Moon Jae-in’s top-aide and former justice minister Cho Kuk) – was also able to appeal to the conservative elements in Korean society by offering a chance to take a “revenge.” As a presidential candidate, Yoon announced his intention to investigate the Moon administration to “eliminate deep-rooted corruptions and irregularities.”

Just as democratization occurred as the previously co-opted generation – which tolerated and even supported authoritarian rule – was gradually replaced by those who opposed authoritarian rule, it is likely that South Korea’s authoritarian legacy will also fade progressively through generational replacement in civil and political society. In this context, it is imperative that South Korea’s current youngest “MZ Generation” (millennials and Generation Z) confront the authoritarian roots of the country’s democracy and mobilize to deepen that democracy, which was hard won by earlier generations.