THE POLITICS OF PUBLIC WELFARE IN SOUTH KOREA, 1990s-2010s: THE RATCHET EFFECT AND THE SUSTAINABILITY OF NEW WELFARE POLICIES

THE POLITICS OF PUBLIC WELFARE IN SOUTH KOREA, 1990s-2010s: THE RATCHET EFFECT AND THE SUSTAINABILITY OF NEW WELFARE POLICIES

This article explores a partisan and electoral dynamics of recent welfare expansion in South Korea (thereafter, Korea). Existing studies explain how and under what circumstances major welfare expansion occurred in the late 1990s and the 2000s by referring to the changing power relation between conservative and reformist parties. Little attention, however, has been paid to another important aspect of the reform dynamics: how and under what circumstances new welfare policies were sustained once they were introduced. The article answers the question by drawing on the notion of ratchet effect of welfare reform – which has been widely developed and tested in the literature of welfare policy feedback in advanced democracies. The article finds that once new policies were introduced, political parties found it electorally risky to withdraw from the policies because these efforts would likely trigger electoral setbacks from social risk groups whose interests were actively advocated by pro-welfare civil society organizations. Such an electoral consideration made not only pro-welfare reformists but the conservatives – who had been rather hostile to welfare expansion – more conciliatory to the new policies.

This article explores a partisan and electoral dynamics of recent welfare expansion in South Korea (thereafter, Korea). Existing studies explain how and under what circumstances major welfare expansion occurred in the late 1990s and the 2000s by referring to the changing power relation between conservative and reformist parties. Little attention, however, has been paid to another important aspect of the reform dynamics: how and under what circumstances new welfare policies were sustained once they were introduced. The article answers the question by drawing on the notion of ratchet effect of welfare reform – which has been widely developed and tested in the literature of welfare policy feedback in advanced democracies. The article finds that once new policies were introduced, political parties found it electorally risky to withdraw from the policies because these efforts would likely trigger electoral setbacks from social risk groups whose interests were actively advocated by pro-welfare civil society organizations. Such an electoral consideration made not only pro-welfare reformists but the conservatives – who had been rather hostile to welfare expansion – more conciliatory to the new policies.