Sung-hyuk Kim

Prolonged intensive conflict and confrontation between a repressive state and an oppositional civil society characterized South Korea's democratic transition from 1985 to 1987. The Korean experiment with democracy1 started with a series of relaxation measures by the ruling authoritarian regime in late 1983 and early 1984. Unlike some of the classic cases belonging to the third wave of global democratization, political liberalization in South Korea was not prompted by a fatal split between hardli

This article analyzes the political dynamics of South Korea’s recent administrative reform. We argue that successive South Korean governments’ New Public Management-inspired reform programs have only achieved partial success. In particular, they have largely failed to attain their ultimate goal – i.e. significant weakening of the traditionally strong elite bureaucracy in policymaking. The bureaucracy in the country has not become weakened as a result of the reform. Rather, the central government

Organizational cynicism is associated with undesirable outcomes such as reduced organizational performance. In this study we examined factors leading to organizational cynicism in a public organization undergoing market-oriented reforms. Participants were 275 employees at Korea Post, Korea. Our empirical results showed that organizational cynicism is decreased by coworker trust and transformational leadership and increased by job stress. Also, the positive role of job stress was stronger for emp

현재 구미의 비교정책학 분야를 주도하고 있는 지배적 패러다임은 각국의 정책 차이를 국내 제도의 相違로 설명하고 있는 신제도주의다. 신제도주의는 그동안 비교정책학 분야에 많은 기여를 하였지만 동시에 두 가지 중요한 한계를 가지고 있다. 첫째는 “제도” 개념이 과도하게 확장되어 그 설명력이 약화되었다는 것이고 둘째는 비교정책학과 주류 행정학과의 관계가 불분명하다는 것이다. 이와 같은 두 가지 한계를 극복하고 비교정책학 분야를 더욱 심화·발전시키기 위해서는 사회적 구성주의와 신비교행정학과의 협력이 필수적이다. 우선 “제도”로써 설명되지 않는 정책 차이를 사회적 구성주의적 변수들에 의해 보완적으로 분석·설명하고 둘째, 신비교행정학과의 이론적 연계를 통해 비교정책학의 행정학적 성격을 강화시켜야 한다. 그 결과 확립되는 신제도주의, 사회적 구성주의, 신비교행정학 간의 三柱的 협력체제는 비교정책학 분야에서 지속적인 학문발전이 이루어질 수 있는 토대를 제공해 줄 것이다.

This article considers the theoretical significance of collaborative governance and analyzes its empirical examples in South Korea. In most industrialized democracies, collaborative governance is considered crucial to strengthening democracy and augmenting welfare. South Korean governments since 1987 have emphasized collaboration by implementing citizen participation in policy making and the provision of welfare services. As examples of citizen participation in policy making, the article examine

Korean democratization defies easy classification and presents a unique challenge to students of comparative politics. Unlike some cases in Southern Europe and Latin America, what happened in Korea in 1987 was not really a "pacted" transition – a democratic transition that is centered around and determined by elite calculations and interactions. That there was a fatal tension and split between the hard-liners (e.g., Chun Doo Hwan) and the soft-liners (e.g., Roh Tae Woo) in June 1987 is a plausib

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsSunhyuk KimSunhyuk Kim is an associate professor in the Department of Public Administration at Korea University.Wonhyuk LimWonhyuk Lim is a fellow at the Korea Development Institute and a nonresident fellow at the Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

Abstract Recent studies on causes of intergovernmental transformation in old and new democracies have found that decentralization is often the outcome of negotiations between national and local political interests. South Korea is commonly believed to be an exception because local elections and institutions introduced in the early 1990s were, by and large, the product of negotiations among political elites at the centre, without significant inclusion of local actors. However, this article attempt

In dealing with the dual challenge of economic restructuring and democratic deepening, the principal strategy of the Kim Dae Jung government in South Korea has been that of parallelism—a simultaneous pursuit of economic and political reforms. This article critically evaluates the feasibility and practicality of this strategy. Despite the significant commonality between the two reforms in their ultimate goal—de-statization—the actual unfoldings of reform politics have been paradoxically self-defe

Abstract This paper analyses the sweeping changes in industrial relations in South Korea that have taken place since democratisation in 1987, which gave workers the right to organise themselves, and critically reviews the development of social dialogue since the financial crisis of 1997. A number of international labour specialists have maintained that social dialogue plays an important role in enhancing economic restructuring and the stability of industrial relations in order to compete in a gl

Focusing on the emergence and evolution of environmentalism in South Korea and Taiwan since the mid-1980s, this paper analyzes the relationship between democratic consolidation and environmental politics. In both countries, an environmental movement arose after a series of environmental disasters and expanded through the effective politicization of environmental issues by the opposition parties. The general relationship between environmental groups and political parties differs significantly in

A comparatively high level of protest activities such as street demonstrations, strikes, sit-ins still persists in post-transitional South Korean politics. What accounts for the persistence of protest activities in South Korea? This paper probes this question, utilizing PEDAK (Protest Event Data Archive Korea), a newly compiled database that stores 20 years’ data (1988-2007) on all protest events reported in two major daily newspapers and two weekly magazines published in South Korea. After repo