The Current State of South Koreas Democracy

Abstract

This article endeavors to contribute to an understanding of the current state of South Koreas democracy. With an innovative dataset from the Varieties of Democracy project, it first scrutinizes the state of South Koreas democracy today from a cross-national perspective, showing the status of South Koreas democracy is virtually at the bottom among advanced industrial democracies across all dimensions of democratic authenticity, quality, and depth. In addition, it confirms that South Koreas democracy has continued to be eroded over the past ten years across all dimensions of democracy: its authenticity, liberal quality, participatory quality, deliberative quality, and depth. It concludes with the finding that South Koreas democracy today is in an extremely perilous position.