The Role of Civil Society in the Democratization of Democracy in South Korea

The institutional foundation of modern democracies is the institutions of representative, electoral, and competitive party politics. For the democratic system to work, however, it must be continuously provided with vitality by a democratic and active civil society. In many democracies today, populist political forces are eroding democracy by linking the mobilization of anxiety and desire within society with the success in electoral politics. South Korea's young democracy shows both how fragile the electoral democracy is and how such fragility can be corrected by active participation of democratic citizens. South Korea was under authoritarian regime for decades, but the civil society organized around the democratization movement achieved democratic transition in 1987. After introducing the basic system of democracy, South Korean politics, on the one hand, showed how elections can work as a mechanism to sustain democratic deficits, but on the other hand, civil societal actors have continued to contribute to the development of participatory and constitutional democracy beyond a mere electoral and competitive democracy. As a recent example, citizens have been able to exert a powerful influence over the parliamentary impeachment of the president who violated the rule of law and constitutional values by means of peaceful protest actions in 2016-2017. This lecture provides research results about the specific political processes of the politics of influence by South Korean civil society and discusses some academic lessons from the experience of South Korea on the complementary relationship between democratic institutions and democratic civil society.

JIN-WOOK SHIN is Professor of Sociology and Director of the DAAD-Center for German and European Studies (ZeDES) at Chung-Ang University in Seoul, South Korea. He studied sociology at Yonsei University in Seoul and received his Ph.D. in Sociology at the Free University of Berlin in 2003. His major research areas are democracy, civil society, social movements, welfare politics, and social inequalities.

Recent publications: The Individualization of Civil Society in the Context of the Information Society (2015), Ideological Conflict in Civil Society and Korean Democracy in Trouble (2015), Increasing Inequality and Quality of Democracy in Korea (2017).