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The resurgence of democracies in non-Western world has been the global phenomenon since the mid 1970s. By now democracy has been consolidated in some countries, but some other new democracies remain precarious and unconsolidated. Transitions to democracy began with the institutional rearrangement of what Dahl called ¡*contestation¡± and ¡*participation¡±. Free, fair, and regular elections were introduced to realize these procedural conditions of democracy. Elections, however, did not bring democracy by default. South Korean experiment of democracy has been successful in terms of the introduction and the establishment of the formal and procedural features of democracy. But further democratization is stagnant and limited by the biased pluralism in the civil society. Regionalism and weak working class have been the two major sources of limited pluralism, which in turn makes the majority rule undemocratic in South Korea. This paper will discuss the possibility of the development of pluralism by tracing the recent changes in the social cleavage structure, regionalism, class cleavage, post-material and generation, and ideology. To do this the paper employs some basic statistical analyses of crosstabulation and simple regression. The survey data was prepare by the Korean Association of Party Studies and JoongAng Ilbo in South Korea in January, 2002. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although in the long term, democratization is expected to exert pacifying effects on international relations, scholars have argued that conflict is more likely during democratic transitions. They argue that politicians in democratizing states are more likely to make jingoistic appeals, and coalitions of political, business, and/or military leaders are likely to form and to ?logroll? for military buildups and other destabilizing policies. This proposition has great significance for East Asia, which faces two potential political transitions: the democratization of China, and Korean unification. This paper tests a theory of democratization and conflict in the cases of three previous East Asian political transitions: Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. I test not only for the occurrence of conflict, but also for the presence of the predicted mechanisms through which conflict occurs (nationalistic appeals and logrolling). I find that although there is some evidence of nationalistic posturing that is consistent with the theory?s predictions, for the most part, evidence from these cases does not support the theory. Leaders did not make jingoistic appeals; they were more likely to preach stability. Furthermore, I find that the public, the military, and the business community do have substantial influence over policy makers, but do not find that these groups advocated military buildups or offensive military strategies. This study casts doubt on the relevance of the ?democratization and war? thesis for future East Asian political transitions; it finds support for theories in the liberal school of international relations, including the beneficial effects of democratization, policies of engagement, and economic integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes political party systems(or the effective number of parties)in terms of votes at the basic unit of competition in the first democratic elections before and after authoritarian interlude in South Korea and Indonesia. Specifically, it deals with the 1960 and 1988 Korean parliamentary elections, and the 1955 and 1999 Indonesian parliamentary elections. This historical comparative and cross-sectional analysis intends to test the key hypotheses in the comparative literature on political party systems:Duverger’s law and hypothesis, Taagepera and Shugart’s generalized Duverger’s rule, Cox’s M+1 rule and interaction hypothesis. I find, first, that bipartism is the exception rather than the rule even under simple and pure plurality rule, which implies that the thesis of strategic voting is misleading. Second, the interaction of high social diversity and weak electoral structure does not necessarily increase the effective number of parties(or candidates). Third, the immediate and most crucial determinant of political party systems is the winner’s(leading political party’s) vote share, regardless of electoral systems or district magnitude. More precisely, the effective number of parties is an inverse function of the winner’s vote share. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the new left in Taiwan and South Korea and the renewed left in Brazil and Chile. I contend that the left can no longer best understood in terms of antiquated sociological or economic categories. The new left in East Asia and Latin America is a political project and its politics are embedded in the processes of democratic transition. My argument is simple: (i) Democratization, a variable process of change, leads to different patterns of new left organization. (ii) Meanwhile, the introduction of democracy, a form of governance with universally shared features (irrespective of how the transition to democracy took place), promotes the moderation of the new left across all four cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Controlling corruption is a difficult task for young democracies. Statistical studies show that only mature and stable democracies that are 40 or more years old are significantly less corrupt than autocracies. Young democracies, on the other hand, are on average no less corrupt than authoritarian regimes. This paper attempts to document the trend of decreasing corruption during the last decade in South Korea, a young democracy that has been known for its high level of corruption in spite of sustained economic growth. Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) and World Bank Institute's Control of Corruption index, the most popularly used measures of perceived corruption, indicate that South Korea has been making little progress during the last decade. Examination of various available data from surveys of perceptions and experience of corruption reveals, however, that the incidence of petty corruption in public administration and election campaigns has substantially decreased over the last decade in South Korea. Also, there is some evidence that high-level political corruption has been decreasing. Overall, Korea seems to be making a remarkable success story in the control of corruption. This study illustrates low reliability of composite indexes of perceived corruption such as CPI and Control of Corruption for the purpose of trend analysis and the usefulness of data from surveys of experience of corruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using recent survey data, this paper aims to empirically investigate the state and source of Korean citizens' trust and confidence in the National Assembly. Roughly speaking, the National Assembly is trusted only by one out of ten citizens. Since the country's democratization, citizens' trust and confidence has been eroding. Presently, the National Assembly is the least trusted among the key public or private institutions. A cross-national comparison of liberal democracies in the world shows that only a few national legislatures are less trusted by their citizens than the Korean National Assembly. Furthermore, this study confirms the empirical validity of performance-based explanation about what factors generate citizens' trust and confidence in the National Assembly. At the aggregate level, an erosion of citizens' trustful attitude toward the legislature is matched by their decreased positive evaluation of the overall job performance by the legislature. At the individual level, a citizen's legislative trust and confidence depends mainly on his or her evaluation of the performance of the legislature itself, the executive interacting with it, or the democratic regime as a whole. Most Koreans pass an unfavorable judgment on the performance of the legislature, not because they think it is a simply idle institution but because politicians are seen to pursue their partisan interests too frantically within the institution. Given its drained reservoir of citizens' favorable attitudes toward it, the present National Assembly, even with its heightened constitutional status and emerging policy activism, will not be highly likely to serve as a reliable agent for facilitating democratic consolidation on Korean soil. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the Taiwanese and South Korean samples of the 2000-2004 Asian Barometer dataset, this paper confirms the Christian democracy hypothesis that Christianity (including Catholicism) contributes to democratization by indoctrinating democratic values and behaviors to their believers. However, the statistical analyses also support the religious market hypothesis that the logic of competition in pluralistic religious markets compels various religions to converge on dominant democratic values and behaviors within each country, although different religions and different countries continue to vary in the degrees and aspects of democratic commitment. These findings offer a more optimistic view for the prospect of non-Christian "religious democracies" than what the current scholarship proposes. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to present an alternative approach to understanding the politics of East Asian democratization with a special focus on South Korea. Taking the May Struggle of 1991—the largest political upheaval since the June Uprising of 1987—as a case study, it examines how peculiarly Confucian moral rhetoric and practices were employed (or exploited) in a series of authoritarian-democratic confrontations. My central argument is that Confucianism was neither in itself an obstacle nor its unquestionable contributor to the democratization of Korea; rather, it furnished both authoritarian and democratic sides with symbolic weapons cultivated in the uniquelyKorean tradition of Confucian moralpolitik. By seeing Confucianism as semiotic practices rather than a reified system of values, the article problematizes the contemporary discussion of "Confucian democracy" that overly glosses over its contrasting dimensions by either idealizing or distorting it. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]