South Korea is one of the most successful cases of democratization and economic growth in the world. It shares one troubling problem with many other countries in recent years: the visible increase of extreme polarization in the language and emotions of political topics. However, Korea has experienced this problem much earlier. The history created weak parties that use deeply effective but harmful stories. This combination creates a downwards spiral where the performance of moral superiority becomes the sharpest weapon. The author points out that we need a standard for viewing this growing problem and argues that the traits of polarization in language are not well understood. Using partisan newspaper text data from 1990 to 2014 and quantitative text analysis, this book collects the most typical emotions and topics used by parties and partisans, analyzing why they exist. In the age of digital data and possibly restricted mobility, this book is a proposal for what the author calls “Computational Area Studies” and “Distant Fieldwork.”

This book studies the sources of inequality in contemporary South Korea and the social and political contention this engenders. Korean society is becoming more polarized. Demands for ‘economic democratization’ and a fairer redistribution of wealth occupy centre-stage of political campaigns, debates and discourse. The contributions offer perspectives on this wide-ranging socio-political change by examining the transformation of organized labour, civil society, the emergence of new cleavages in society, and the growing ethnic diversity of Korea’s population. Bringing together a team of scholars on Korea’s transition and democratization, the story the books tells is one of a society acutely divided by the neo-liberal policies that accompanied and followed the Asian financial crisis. Taken together, the contributions argue that tackling inequalities are challenges that Korean policy-makers can no longer postpone. The solution, however, cannot be imposed, once again, from the top down, but needs to arise from a broader conversation including all segments of Korean society. The book is intended for a readership interested in South Korean politics specifically, and global experiences in transition more generally.

Like in many other states worldwide, democracy is in trouble in South Korea, entering a state of regressionin the past decade, barely thirty years after its emergence in 1987. The society that had ordinary citizensleading “candlelight protests” demanding the impeachment of Park Geun-Hye in 2016–17 has becomepolarized amid an upsurge of populism, driven by persistent structural inequalities, globalization, and therise of the information society. The symptoms of democratic decline have been increasingly hard to miss: the demonization of politicalopponents, erosion of democratic norms, and the whittling away of the courts’ independence. Perhapsmost disturbing is that this all took place under a government dominated by former pro-democracyactivists. Will the election victory of opposition leader Yoon Suk-Yeol end this democratic erosion, or willthe rift between South Korea’s progressives and conservatives only deepen with the next administration? The contributors to this volume trace the sources of illiberalism in today’s Korea; examine how politicalpolarization is plaguing its party system; discuss how civil society and the courts have become politicized;look at the roles of inequality, education, and social media in the country’s democratic decline; andconsider how illiberalism has affected Korea’s foreign policy.

This book focuses on the changing role of media in the more democratised political landscape of South Korea. It contributes to debates about the emerging role of the media in democratic transition, especially in relation to approaches that go beyond traditional Western constructs of media freedom and the relationship between the state and the media.

The twelve chapters in this volume seek to overcome the nationalist paradigm of Japanese repression and exploitation versus Korean resistance that has dominated the study of Korea’s colonial period (1910–1945) by adopting a more inclusive, pluralistic approach that stresses the complex relations among colonialism, modernity, and nationalism. By addressing such diverse subjects as the colonial legal system, radio, telecommunications, the rural economy, and industrialization and the formation of industrial labor, one group of essays analyzes how various aspects of modernity emerged in the colonial context and how they were mobilized by the Japanese for colonial domination, with often unexpected results. A second group examines the development of various forms of identity from nation to gender to class, particularly how aspects of colonial modernity facilitated their formation through negotiation, contestation, and redefinition.

This book theoretically and empirically explores recent internal and external challenges to South Korea's foreign policy. It analyzes how democratization and economic globalization have changed domestic politics in South Korea and reshaped its foreign policies.

The debate in South Korea over the government's engagement policy toward North Korea (the "sunshine" policy) did not start with Pyongyang's recent admission that it has been secretly pursuing a nuclear weapons program in violation of multiple international commitments. However, the evolution of the debate will be an important determinant of how the South Korean and broader international response to this latest North Korean challenge ultimately ends. This book provides a framework for viewing South Korean responses to this challenge, examining the South Korean debate over policies toward the North, analyzing the sources of controversy, and assessing their implications.