Korean Studies of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies

Erik Mobrand, Clark W. Sorensen, Clark W. Sorensen

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780295745480
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Korean History
• Index: History

While popular movements in South Korea rightly grab the headlines for forcing political change and holding leaders to account, those movements are only part of the story of the construction and practice of democracy. In Top-Down Democracy in South Korea, Erik Mobrand documents another part – the elite-led design and management of electoral and party institutions. Even as the country left authoritarian rule behind, elites 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.

CHAPTER 1

The 1963 System

IN 1994, seven years after the start of political liberalization, South Korea’s legislature revised the authoritarian-era election laws. The new law outlined brief campaign periods of between thirteen and twenty days, depending on the type of election, and numerous restrictions on what candidates could do. Irked at a law that appeared to benefit incumbents and candidates connected with the major parties, an independent contestant in a by-election went to court to challenge the short campaign periods. The Constitutional Court ruling, which upheld the limits, drew attention to the dangers of “overheated” elections and the importance of quick campaigns: “If election campaigning could go on indefinitely without a limited period, then excessive competition between candidates would create difficulties for election management and stopping the outbreak of illegal behavior would be difficult.… [W]e always have problems of elections influenced by money, office, and violence, as well as overheated elections. Under these conditions, to prevent the above harmful effects and realize fair elections, we cannot conclude that limiting election campaigning to a definite period is unconstitutional.”1

This decision reflects core themes in legislation and judicial thinking about elections. If elections invite “excessive competition” (chinach’in kyŏngjaeng), so this logic holds, then limits should be imposed on political speech and organization. Because “overheated elections” (kwayŏl sŏn’gŏ) can bring acrimony and costly campaigns, parties and candidates should face restrictions on how they reach out to voters. These keywords appear repeatedly in election commission documents, in judicial decisions, and in legislation on elections, parties, and political finance. They are used to explain the need for restrictions ranging from limiting speeches to preventing gift giving, from holding primaries to banning local party units.

This logic of electoral management was not new in 1994; it was a holdover from the authoritarian period. The principles, centered on minimizing popular participation, and structures built on those principles persisted beyond the political opening of the 1980s. Democratic South Korea inherited a regulatory framework that imposed restrictions on opportunities to express political views in the context of elections. Judges, legislators, and elections officials shared and perpetuated a set of values—an ethos—that justified this framework. This electoral ethos and the framework it legitimized, while forged in a period that would scarcely be considered liberal today, profoundly shaped electoral engagement, political parties, and the party landscape. The purpose of this chapter is to identify the origins of the electoral ethos and framework. Subsequent chapters examine continuities beyond the democratic transition.

South Korea moved in three strides to the creation of the 1963 system. Each stride began with popular demands for greater mass representation and ended with a response that was a step toward the 1963 system. The first, prompted by activism immediately before and after the republic’s establishment in 1948, was drawing the political sphere’s boundaries to exclude popular and local representation. The second was forming a collusive party system, which, faced with a progressive third party, turned to law in the late 1950s to entrench the two main parties’ dominance. The third was constructing a civilian order under Park Chung Hee in the name of the country’s first “democracy movement.”

FROM PEASANT UPRISINGS TO A TRUNCATED POLITICAL SPHERE

The electoral ethos and the system it justified were by no means inevitable at the republic’s establishment in 1948. Elections could be disorderly. An emphasis on process was notably lacking. Parties also failed to make their mark in the first few elections. Nonetheless, foundations for the 1963 system were laid early, as the postcolonial political order was being constructed. This process of state-building unfolded in response to local uprisings that began with Korea’s liberation from colonial rule.

Uprisings and Counterrevolutionary State-Building

The years between 1945 and 1953 saw widespread activism following the end of colonial rule, three years of rule by an American military regime, the establishment of an independent republic, continued suppression of rebellions, and a disastrous war. Liberation from Japan in August 1945 gave way to a flowering of local political organizing on the Korean Peninsula. Farmers organized peasant unions and pushed for land reform and for keeping collaborators out of power.2 These activities were mostly uncoordinated across localities. The United States arrived in Seoul as part of a planned caretaker government that would run the southern part of the country until an arrangement for an independent and unified Korea could be found. The American military government, which ruled southern Korea for three years, moved to suppress most local activism. This response contributed to greater frustration and continued violence. The interaction between the military government and Koreans seeking greater control over their own affairs set the course for continued violence.

Uprisings dominated the concerns of the United States during its three years ruling southern Korea. It was in the context of fighting what was seen as an insurgency that Washington’s delegates sought to construct a political order in Korea. The US Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) had two objectives in Korea: establishing order and ensuring that friendly political forces gained power. General John R. Hodge, the top military commander in Korea, viewed political organization in ideological terms and mistook spontaneous local organizing for the machinations of P’yŏngyang or Moscow. The Americans thought people’s committees must have a leftist agenda and viewed the individual who attempted to bring together these organizations at the national level, Yŏ Unhyŏng (Lyuh Woon-hyung), with suspicion.3 Order would not come at the cost of allowing perceived leftists into power. The state was one of the few sources of authority that the American military government seemed willing to trust. The entire realm of local society was deemed an illegitimate source of authority. The combination of priorities meant that the government would devote its energy to suppressing postcolonial uprisings. A consequence, as noted by political scientist Pak Ch’anp’yo, was that the postcolonial state set the parameters for the political sphere, which in turn created civil society. This nesting of social and political forces in the state would have long-term implications.4

The Americans used several methods in the counterrevolutionary state-building project. The administration restored institutions and staff from the colonial era, since doing so was easier than starting fresh and such personnel were unlikely to be leftists. Suppression through police and paramilitary forces was another method. An example of their work comes from September and October 1946, when a strike developed into a regional and then broader episode of worker and farmer unrest. The initial demands centered on rice rations, but the movement quickly spread to include farmers aggrieved by the lack of land reform and the persistence of the colonial rice collection program. Some 2.3 million people became involved.5 Police worked with vigilante groups—some identified as “youth associations”—to put down the protests.6 At least thirty-eight people were killed, and by early October the authorities declared martial law. Further episodes of uprising and violent suppression occurred in 1947–48 on Cheju Island, where people’s committees provided effective leadership, and in autumn 1948 in the southwest, where a mutiny led rebels to take control over the coastal areas of Yŏsu and Sunch’ŏn.7 In both episodes, vigilante groups worked side by side with police. The government repeatedly called on coercive forces to deal with uprisings such as these. It also began to design political institutions that could help consolidate control.

Parties and Regulation of Politics

Among the many political parties operating in postcolonial Seoul, one that would have enduring significance was the Korea Democratic Party (KDP). Its core membership had been chosen by the American military government to one day run the government. Soon after arriving in September 1945, the Americans identified as future leaders a clique of conservative landowning elites who had remained in Korea and done well under colonialism, including Cho Pyŏngok, Song Chinu, Yun Posŏn, and the industrialist Kim Sŏngsu. American leaders preferred them because they had experience in the country and seemed reliably anticommunist.8 Today, many are considered to have been collaborators with the Japanese in the positions they held before 1945. In the American military regime, KDP figures and their allies held government offices. Cho Pyŏngok, for example, served as police superintendent. In this role, he was instrumental in directing government resources to police and paramilitary units for putting down strikes and attacking alleged state enemies. KDP personalities such as Cho thus drew strength from counterrevolutionary state-building.9

In addition to supporting a particular elite group and deploying force against those perceived to be subversive, USAMGIK established rules to influence the party landscape. In February 1946, the military government put out a set of “rules on parties” under law 55. Parties had to report the names of their high-level members, the organizations that provided financing, the number of members, and any cooperation with other parties in the previous sixty days. The law did not forbid particular sorts of parties, but its political purpose was not lost on activists. Soon after the law’s promulgation some forty organizations, including progressive parties, signed a statement opposing the law on the grounds that it would interfere in their operations. When parties refused to register, the government cited lack of registration as grounds to order the parties to disband.10 Law 55 gave the state a legal basis for threatening left-wing parties and forcibly dismantling parties.

A proliferation of parties was one of the notable features of the period before the republic’s founding. Enthusiasm for organizing was in the air. Americans reported that “whenever two Koreans get together they form a political party.”11 The suggestion that forming small parties around individual personalities is a Korean cultural trait may have some merit. On the other hand, it was a law—created by Americans—that required small groups of Koreans to register as parties.

Another set of limits on the electoral sphere came in the form of campaign restrictions. The American military government promulgated an election law in 1947 in preparation for the inaugural assembly election of the following year. This law safeguarded free campaigning.12 In December 1948, the new Republic of Korea (ROK) government passed a revised election law. Article 27 of the revised law introduced a requirement that candidates register. Once registered, candidates could campaign. This article was not explicitly a restriction on campaigning, but it meant that a prospective candidate could not begin campaigning before registering. An effect of the article was to introduce a division in what political activities were permitted before and after candidate registration.13 Electoral politics thus belonged to a domain separate from the everyday context in which freedoms of speech and assembly applied. As such, electoral politics could be subject to special regulation. This identification of electoral politics as a special domain laid down a legal and normative basis for future regulation of parties and elections. The law was an important early effort at using legal means to impose restrictions on electoral activity.

Exclusion as a Condition for Political Community

As the Americans prepared to hand over power to Koreans in 1948, elections posed a serious dilemma: a unified Korea would be possible only if elections were held on both sides of the thirty-eighth parallel, but doing so would bring communists into contention for power. Moderates in South Korea called for peninsula-wide elections. Rightists clamored for elections in the south only, for that would weaken the Left. The United Nations, which oversaw the elections, prepared for simultaneous contests in the north and south. The Soviets declined northern participation. When elections limited to the south were announced, communists were banned from contesting seats. Left-wing groups in the south seethed with anger. They had been denied a legitimate place in institutionalized politics, and near-term unification of the peninsula had been effectively ruled out. Not only had the ROK’s establishment in August 1948 formalized the peninsula’s division, but the unity of the new republic was premised on an internal division as well.

There was a modicum of compromise in these early political arrangements. The first assembly had several progressive legislators who, like much of the assembly, were unaffiliated with parties. As Hwasook Nam points out, these politicians—who opposed the National Security Act—represented popular interests in a way that became impossible after anticommunism intensified with the war’s outbreak.14

According to political scientist Dankwart Rustow, national consensus is an essential first step for a viable democracy. Without consensus on what issues can be the subject of public politics, democratic politics cannot be civil. In South Korea, Rustow’s “hot family feud,”15 the precursor to consensus, was particularly hot. That conflict did not lead to democracy; instead, the bloody crushing of peasant revolution truncated the sphere of articulate political demands. Unity came from suppression. With the establishment of the republic, “the search for Korean cohesion was over.”16 This beginning to the state foreshadowed a political system in which a public political sphere would be permitted but only on the grounds that it would be cordoned off for voices outside the “consensus.”

Conflict continued after the 1948 elections, but battles were fought through rebellion, police and vigilante action, and military confrontation, not through elections. American officials chalked up electoral irregularities to the challenges of “maintaining democracy on the borders of Communism”—a phrase that understates a profound contradiction.17 Holding elections in the context of antirevolutionary state-building meant infusing them with a particular character that had little to do with American understandings of their own democracy. Anticommunist democracy justified unfree elections. The security imperative of anticommunism—and especially the domestic threat—mandated limiting the freedoms necessary for making elections real political contests. Electoral mobilization could hardly be open because that could allow in state enemies, a very convenient point for elites...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Announcement Page
• Series list
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Participation and Exclusion in a Democracy
• 1. The 1963 System
• 2. De-authoritarianization
• 3. Practicing Top-Down Democracy
• 4. The Participatory Moment
• 5. Backlash
• 6. Rethinking Democratization
• Conclusion: South Korea’s Democracy in Global Perspective
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index