The Democratic Deficit in South Korea: The 2012 Presidential Election and its Aftermath

Abstract

The 17th presidential race in South Korea (2012) resulted in the election of Conservative Saenuri Party candidate Park Geun-hye—the daughter of the country's longest ruling dictator Park Chung-hee—defeating her progressive rival Moon Jae-in of the Democratic United Party. This article analyses the results of the presidential election and its aftermath and thereby identifies problems and challenges for Korea's democratic consolidation. By focusing on three sets of issues in the consolidation of democracy—(1) democratic accountability, (2) policy responsiveness and (3) political legitimacy—I discuss the ways in which the political institutions do or do not live up to public expectations.

Notes

1 Since the transition to democracy, Korea has improved in its indices for democracy, including freedom house index, the economist intelligent unit democracy index and the quality of democracy ranking.

2 The official election manifestos of each candidate are accessible at the Korean National Election website: http://www.nec.go.kr/portal/bbs/view/B0000338/6178.do?menuNo=200185. For a comparison of the key policies between the two candidates, see http://www.peoplepower21.org/Politics/979634.

3 The result is from analysis of the monthly omnibus survey conducted in January 2013 by the East Asia Institute (EAI) and Hankook Research Ltd.

4 Since 1987, 110 political parties have been officially registered, 40 out of which have managed to send at least one delegate to the National Assembly. This record suggests fragility of the Korean party system.

5 It had been up in the air who would be Park's opposition challenger until three days before the registration deadline when Ahn Cheol-soo withdrew his candidacy after prolonged negotiations over a merger with Moon Jae-in failed. Despite the merger being viewed as inevitable by both sides as they were splitting the liberal votes, the negotiations over who should step aside were tense and caused several deadlocks. Amid a deadlock in merger talks Ahn's support rate had been in decline, dropping him to third place below both Park and Moon, especially after Ahn declined the merger proposal mediated by civil society leaders. With no institutional backing, Ahn appeared to be extremely sensitive to fluctuations of opinion polls and indeed, his abrupt withdrawal exemplifies his limits as an independent candidate.

6 The DUP members of the Women's and Family Committee claimed that Park was a woman only in the biological sense, but otherwise represented the country's patriarchal tradition all her life, which sparked controversy in the National Assembly in October 2012.

7 These percentages for the 2002 presidential election are based on the exit polls conducted by KBS.

8 Many of Park's key pledges on welfare—i.e., the pledge to provide the health insurance to cover all costs for treatment of cancer and three other hard-to-cure diseases, and the pledge to introduce flat-rate universal cash subsidies for those aged 65 and over—were hence significantly watered down even prior to taking office.

9 Only four women were elected to the district seats for the Saenuri Party under Park's leadership in 2012, compared to 10 women in 2008 for the GNP under Lee Myung-bak, for example. For details, see National Assembly Research Service (NARS) 2014.

10 The survey was conducted by the Mono Research Institute on 5 November 2013. The margin of error is ±2.88%, at the 95% confidence level.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hyunji Lee

Hyunji Lee is a Research Associate at the Institute of Asian Research at the University of British Columbia. E-mail: [email protected]