Civil Society and Democracy in South Korea: a Reassessment

In the literatures on democratic transition and consolidation—often pompously called “transitology” and “consolidology” respectively—the status and value of South Korea are quite distinct. The South Korean case was an anomaly that did not quite conform to the long-verified pattern of the elitist paradigm, highlighting elite compositions, calculations, and interactions (See O’Donnell and Schmitter, 1986; Higley and Gunther, 1992 for examples of the elitist paradigm). Rather, South Korea’s transition was mobilization-led and mass-ascendant, prompting many analysts to characterize it as a “movement-driven transition” (Cho, 1998; Kim, 2000; Choi, 2002). The South Korean case, in fact, served as one of the crucial precursors in the emerging wave of “bottom-up” transitions that ultimately swept Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe. What is even more unique in the case of South Korea is that civil society continued to play important roles even in the post-transitional period, long into the consolidational phase, spearheading and sustaining diverse reform campaigns (Kim, 2002). In this chapter, we revisit and reassess the relationship between civil society and democracy in South Korea. We pay particular attention to how the relationship has survived the past 25 years of four different governments, both conservative and progressive. What has really happened to civil society after democratization? What does the fact that the South Korean transition was led by civic mobilization has to do with consolidational politics? Does civil society still preserve its influence on democratic change? What are the changes and continuities in civil society per se? These are some of the questions we aim to answer in this chapter. We first discuss, as a theoretical prelude, the nexus between civil society and democratic consolidation, and the change in South Korean civil society after democratization. Then, the main part provides an in-depth description of how the civil society-state relationship has evolved over the different democratic governments in the past twenty years, from the Kim Young-sam government to the Park Geun-hye government.