Top-Down Democracy in South Korea

Although South Korea is widely heralded as a successful new democracy—buttressed by a politically engaged public—elections have done less than expected to force political parties to reorganize their elitist structures. In Top-Down Democracy in South Korea, Erik Mobrand demonstrates that political elites, contrary to theoretical expectations, have responded to freer and fairer elections by entrenching rather than abandoning exclusionary practices and forms of party organization.

Exploring South Korea's political development from 1945 through the end of dictatorship in the 1980s and into the twenty-first century, Mobrand challenges the view that the origins of the postauthoritarian political system lie in a series of popular movements that eventually undid repression. He argues that we should think about democratization not as the establishment of an entirely new system, but as the subtle blending of new formal rules with earlier authority structures, political institutions, and legitimizing norms.