Political Reform as Ongoing Development in the Post-democratization Era

The panel will seek to explains how Korea strengthened its democracy for over three and half decades since the late 1980s. It will show how its politics worked to implement institutional reforms in order to regulate powerful groups, to disperse their power, and to ensure the people become further empowered.
We characterize political reforms as ongoing “development” that needs to continue in order to minimize backsliding over time, the backsliding that we see in any democracies where powerful groups arise, amass power, and end up weakening the democracy itself.
The first paper will discuss how power was taken away from the military that had dominated the society for nearly thirty years. Going against the conventional view that power changes hands, mostly when the group that possesses it decides to do so, the paper will show that, in Korea, the people succeeded in building enough momentum behind democratic leaders who then acted boldly to force the military to come under the civilian control.
The second paper will examine “civil society” and its role in democratic transition. It will show how the pre-democratization ruling elites—even without being fragmented—were overpowered by the pro-democracy movement that the civil society pushed ahead.
The third paper will explain how Korea ensured its electoral system function properly, showing that the Korea National Election Commission played a key role, based on its constitutional privilege of institutional independence and effective bureaucratic capability.
The fourth paper will show how the Korean people succeeded in forming a strong enough consensus and forced their politicians to enact laws to limit money flows into their campaign funds, which worked toward making the democracy sustainable.
The fifth paper will discuss how the Korean public came to demand strict rules to prevent public figures from seeking and serving private interests. Similar to the experience of controlling political money, this case will demonstrate the power of public consensus in bringing in big changes to limit the elites for the sake of public interest.