The main purpose of this research project is to investigate how popular protest has changed the relationship between civil society and the state, and how the reconfigured civil society-state relations, in turn, have affected democratic consolidation i ...
The main purpose of this research project is to investigate how popular protest has changed the relationship between civil society and the state, and how the reconfigured civil society-state relations, in turn, have affected democratic consolidation in Korea. The primary analytical focus is put on protest events and contentious politics of civil society actors. Based on a new database covering 17 years of Korea's post-transitional period (1987-2003), this project examines how diverse actors in civil society have conflictually engaged with the state on numerous outstanding political, economic, social, and foreign policy issues. The main strength of this project is twofold. First, this project is an unprecedented attempt to map out the organizational landscape of civil society in Korea. The data, which were collected, entered, and coded by three well-trained graduate research assistants under my guidance, are based on close readings of four major media sources in Korea: two daily newspapers and two weekly magazines. All 6,453 protest events reported in the four media sources were recorded and coded according to an internationally standardized data collection protocol. The data collection protocol was originally designed and developed by Grzegorz Ekiert (Harvard University) and Jan Kubik (Rutgers University) and was successfully employed in analyzing Central and East European countries. Second, this project is aimed to derive theoretically generalizable conclusions from the Korean case. In this project, I use a version of the Ekiert & Kubik data collection protocol slightly modified to suit the Korean case, which guarantees a substantial degree of continuity with Ekiert & Kubik's previous work on nascent post-communist democracies. By explicitly placing the case of Korea in comparative perspective, I expect to derive generalizable and potentially replicable empirical and prescriptive implications, thereby enriching the existing literature on democratic transition and consolidation. This study will make crucial and multiple contributions to political science and sociology. First, it will make a significant contribution to the existing literature on democratic transition and consolidation, by highlighting civil society and its collective action and hence redressing the elitist bias prevalent in the existing literature on democratization. As well, by focusing on the impact of contentious politics on democratic consolidation, it will enrich discussions on subtypes of democracy or "democracy with adjectives." Second, this project will test the validity of the existing theories in the social movement literature. The Korean case provides fertile grounds for comparatively assessing the existing theoretical accounts of the emergence and evolution of civil society's protest activities, such as: 1) the relative deprivation model, 2) instrumental institutionalism, 3) historical-cultural institutionalism, and 4) the resource mobilization framework. This project will also contribute to policy and governance studies by helping to design, construct, and institutionalize a better civil society-state relationship to promote democratic consolidation and deepening. This project, by drawing from Korea a set of policy prescriptions for preventing, managing, and ameliorating the conflictual relationship between a contentious civil society and a strong state, will contribute to the designing of a better institutional arrangement in which civil society and state can cooperate to address and solve difficult problems in politics, society, and economy.