Top-Down Democracy in South Korea

This book offers an insightful view of South Korea's democratization and democracy, providing yet another buoy for scholars to navigate the country's dynamic developments. There is, of course, already a wide array of literature on the Third Wave paragon, ranging from accounts that explain its alleged “defects” by alluding to culturalist arguments of too authoritarian beliefs and norms, a simply too young democracy, and the haunting legacies dating back to the republic's beginning and its “counterrevolutionary state-building project” (p. 9). Drawing on the last strand, Mobrand directs the reader's attention to a pattern he finds most compelling in explaining South Korea's particular manifestation of postdemocracy: the political elite's continuous efforts to limit access to the institutionalized political arena under the pretext of a covertly “antiparticipatory electoral ethos” (p. 101). Mobrand pinpoints the Park Chung-hee regime (1961–79), and in particular the year 1963, as the crossroads where political elites, under the...