Sunkyoung Park

Abstract This study explores how authoritarian distributive policies may not only generate political support for the autocrat but may also help sustain powerful and lasting authoritarian legacies. We use microlevel data from South Korea's New Village Movement, a 1970s rural development program implemented under dictator Park Chung‐hee and widely touted as contributing to the country's rapid economic development. Our analysis shows that townships in receipt of larger cash transfers cast more vote

Abstract Why do some people express optimism about their future social mobility, while others have a pessimistic view? This paper examines whether and how local wealth inequality is associated with individuals’ pessimistic or optimistic expectations of their future social mobility in South Korea. It argues that people in districts with greater economic inequality will have more pessimistic views of their future upward mobility, as high local inequality raises concerns among the public that their

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the paradoxical pattern in which South Korean presidents enjoy imperial power early in their term, but became fragile and impotent as their term comes to an end. Design/methodology/approach Based on the previous literature on Korean presidentialism, this paper introduces and critically compares several competing theories on the Korean presidency and its defects. Findings This paper finds that for Korean presidents, imperial governance and fragi

최근 민주주의의 퇴행과 위기에 대한 연구들은 민주주의에 대한 위협이 포퓰리즘과 기술관료주의로부터 올 가능성을 제시하지만, 한국에서 누가 전문가 기술관료주의를 지지하는지, 그리고 이것이 민주주의의 위협이 되는지에 대한 연구는 매우 부족하다. 이에 본 연구는 한국인의 기술관료주의에 대한 선호를 결정하는 요인을 분석한다. 구체적으로 민주주의에 대한 포괄적 지지가 낮은 사람일수록 그리고 권위주의에 대한 향수가 강한 사람일수록 전문가 기술관료주의를 지지할 것이라고 주장한다. 2022년에 시행된 설문조사 자료를 분석한 결과, 권위주의 향수가 강한 사람일수록 전문가 기술관료주의에 찬성할 확률이 높았지만, 민주주의에 대한 포괄적 지지와 기술관료주의 간 상관관계는 발견되지 않았다.

Legislators’ responsiveness to citizens constitutes a crucial element of democracy. Nevertheless, previous studies conducted in established democracies found that only about half of legislators respond to requests for constituency service and that they are more responsive to certain groups of citizens than others. To address such limitations, we conducted a field experiment in South Korea and found that only 12% of local councilors are responsive. We also found that despite such low responsivene

This file describes the replication materials for Hong, Ji Yeon, Sunkyoung Park and Hyunjoo Yang, "In Strongman We Trust: The Political Legacy of the New Village Movement in South Korea".

Large language models are increasingly applied to political discourse, but their ability to detect culturally grounded gender sensitivity remains underexplored. We introduce KOGENT, a benchmark dataset of 1,222 transcripts from the Korean National Assembly, annotated for gender sensitivity across 6,024 utterances. Each utterance is labeled as high or low in gender sensitivity, based on contextual indicators of bias, discrimination, or inclusion, and tagged for the target group. KOGENT spans Kore

This study explores how authoritarian distributive policies may not only generate political support for the autocrat but may also help to sustain powerful and lasting authoritarian legacies. We use micro-level data from South Korea's New Village Movement, a 1970s rural development program implemented under dictator Park Chung-hee and widely touted as contributing to the country's rapid economic development. Our analysis shows that townships receiving larger cash transfers cast more votes for Par