1. Social Cleavage Structure and Democracy in South Korea.
- Author
-
In-Sub Ma
- Subjects
- *
DEMOCRACY , *ELECTIONS , *DEMOCRATIZATION , *SOCIAL structure ,SOUTH Korean politics & government - Abstract
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]
- Published
- 2002