"Contentious Democracy" in South Korea: An Active Civil Society and Ineffectual Political Parties

Abstract

South Korea's twenty-five-year-old democracy is a ”contentious” one, in which important public matters are often debated and decided through direct contention and confrontation between civil society and the state, without mediation through political parties as is usually the case in many Western ”representative” democracies. Popular protests and street demonstrations continue to be a preferred form of political expression in South Korean democracy. The other aspect of Korea's very active civil society is underinstitutionalized and ineffectual political parties. Whether underdeveloped political parties prove to be a temporary problem in an innovative experiment with creating a new type of ”contentious democracy,” or a fatal flaw that will undermine South Korean democracy, remains to be seen.