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This paper examines the South Korean people's authoritarian experiences in developing and sustaining a popular New Community Movement since its creation in 1970. By analysing three key features of the initial stage of the NCM under the growth-oriented authoritarian Park Chung Hee state (1961-1979), the paper argues that the NCM experience provided the majority of Koreans, particularly rural peasants and women, hands-on-training in participatory village-community democracy, which in turn provided a wide range of social opportunities, even unwittingly, for their own empowerment. The paper also argues that the Korean people's training in village-community democracy also provided a self-awakening experience, through which they built their own set of ideas of self-identity as the people or minjung and of minjung democracy which was essentially an off-shoot of the NCM, more specifically, Park's idea of "Korean democracy". The paper suggests that the recent resurgence of the NCM may reflect the democratic legacy of the authoritarian Park era, epitomized in its "Can-do" participatory ethos and the fierce nationalism of the Koreans, albeit in a highly sophisticated and yet paradoxical way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, there has been rising interest in candidate quality and characteristics among political scientists. Scholars have analyzed the impact of candidate quality on electorates' candidate evaluations and vote choice. Most of the often-cited work on candidate quality deals with candidates and elections in the U.S. with a lesser amount of work focusing on European countries. It is remarkable that very few of these studies on candidate quality focus on elections in new democracies. As new democracies have had relatively little time to develop candidate recruitment processes, candidate quality is probably low compared to the established democracies of Western Europe and North America. Therefore, new democracies can be fertile ground for the study of the lack of candidate quality and its impact on voting behavior. In this paper, we study candidate quality and elections in one of the new democracies, Korea. Previous studies of voting behavior in Korea and in new democracies, in general, usually look at the vote choice of the electorate along established and/or emerging social cleavages, such as class differences, regionalism, religion, as well as macro environmental factors, such as the national economy. We utilize survey data to analyze the impact of the specific quality of candidates (candidate characteristics) on the vote choice of the electorate. If the quality of political candidates does not keep pace with that of the sophisticated public, we may see apathy on the part of the electorate (low turnout) or a form of negative voting. The election we analyze is the latest presidential election in Korea held in December 2007. Our results show a high level of negative voting in response to the candidates' perceived negative traits. Our work is a testimony that voters in new democracies also pay attention to the individual candidate's quality or characteristics, and make their vote choice accordingly. Therefore, future studies of voting behavior in new democracies should include candidate quality (or characteristics, traits or whatever it is called) as an explanatory variable in their models. We end the paper by offering our conjecture about why the electorate's perception of candidate quality is so low in Korea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By examining Korean dirigisme, or system of state-led development, its socio-economic consequences, and its post-1997 reform efforts and trends, this paper aims to suggest how Korea’s fundamentally undemocratic and exclusionary mode of statism threatens the nation’s long-term socio-economic health, laying out what human-centered development entails and why Korea would want to reconstruct the state and redefine its goals and means on the basis of the concept of people-centeredness. Among other things, the present paper critically looks at the increasing polarization of the Korean society, economy and industrial structure; the current inadequacies of the financial intermediaries and city banks in particular in supplying corporate investment funds or in helping to improve corporate governance by making a long-term commitment through debt-equity swaps and by learning to provide credible credit analysis and monitoring based on accumulated information; and the government’s persistent failure in fully enforcing existing laws and rules on insider trading, accounting fraud, and other illegal transactions especially in the wake of the crisis and subsequent reforms. Clearly, reconstructing the state and thereby crafting a democratic and empowering dirigisme constitutes Korea’s pressing task in its quest for a good society. Such reconstruction of the state does not in any way eliminate national sovereignty; it may just transform the means and purposes of the nation-state without weakening or withering its capacity. The reconstructed state can and does play a positive role in transforming state-society relations, providing social safety nets, empowering financial institutions, inventing a vibrant civil society and actively building democratic institutions to allow for orderly bottom-up changes. The key indeed lies in how to forge what mixture of state and market. As the purpose of human-centered development is to enhance the well-being, economic equity, human dignity, liberty and community of the ordinary citizens, indispensable would be empowering people especially at lower levels both in and outside of government bureaucracies. The delegation of authority needs to occur not just between higher and lower institutions and organizations, but also within each and every organization. If the pattern of heads of institutions running their organizations as their own fiefdom gets simply replicated at lower levels, such de-concentration would be inadequate to serve the needs of ordinary people. If heads of lower organizations were to act only as little czars pursuing their own personal purposes, such de-concentration or decentralization may not have achieved much except a fragmentation and localization of the essentially same, if centralized, spoils system. Thus, institutionalization of democratic values such as public trust and rule of law also needs to occur. Still, dirigiste choice of growth over equity at an early stage of development process may not be easily reversible at a later stage. Dirigiste development and undemocratic governance create entrenched, self-sustaining interests and structures that no amount of reform politics as usual can touch. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing literature surveys how democracy changes the government?s spending priorities in Latin America. This paper extends study to the Asian-Newly Industrialized Countries (NICs) to evaluate how specific democratic procedures ? elections and legislative fragmentation ? affect military and civilian allocations. It also considers how the sequence and rules of the budgetary process affect results. The analyses of government spending in South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore from the 1960s to 2000 reveal two important findings. First, the budgetary process significantly influences how the effects of elections and legislative fragmentation are manifested; indeed, the effects of elections and legislative fragmentation on the government?s spending priorities are clear and robust only when the sequence and rules of budget making are modeled. Second, democracy does not affect government spending separately from elections and legislative fragmentation in South Korea and Taiwan ? it has a distinct effect only on spending in Singapore. These findings add nuances and new perspectives to the study of democracy?s effects on the government?s military and civilian allocations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Northeast Asian countries, which consist of a former socialist (China) and two capitalist (South Korea and Japan) countries with large populations, have become the fast－growing economies. They have shown relatively high levels of corruption situation in comparison with their economic influences in world economy. Specially, China is facing a serious corruption problem which prevents politico－economic development and social consensus in the long run.Recently, the hypothesis that a market－oriented democracy is the best model for economic development is accepted among many scholars. It suggests that the strategies for economic growth should be based on market principles and political democratization in the long term. From the perception that market－oriented democracy is the best solution for economic development, people in Northeast Asian countries recognize that state intervention, which undermines a self－regulating market, should be minimized in the economic sectors, and bureaucratic corruption that hinders socio－cultural progress should be eliminated in every sphere of society.Market－democracy advocates argue that the fundamental causes of Northeast Asian countries corruption originate from the immaturity of political democratization. They propose the formation of Northeast Asian anti－corruption regime as a desirable instrument of improving their corruption levels. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]