Civic Engagement and Democracy in South Korea

A comparatively high level of protest activities such as street demonstrations, strikes, sit-ins still persists in post-transitional South Korean politics. What accounts for the persistence of protest activities in South Korea? This paper probes this question, utilizing PEDAK (Protest Event Data Archive Korea), a newly compiled database that stores 20 years’ data (1988-2007) on all protest events reported in two major daily newspapers and two weekly magazines published in South Korea. After reporting changes and continuities in the overall patterns of protest behaviors after the democratic transition, the paper contemplates several theoretical hypotheses to explicate the causes of the primacy of popular protest in South Korea’s politics of democratic consolidation. This paper demonstrates how confrontational legacies, ineffective participatory mechanisms, and underinstitutionalized political parties have all collaborated to engender a democracy in which contentions and confrontations, rather than consultations and compromises, have become a routine and the “rule of the game.”