Park Geun-hye Research Articles

Shifting from top-down to bottom-up nationalism: an analysis of YouTube speeches from the 2016/17 candlelight revolution in South Korea

ABSTRACT While the ‘top-down’ variant of nationalism is engendered by elites and emphasizes loyalty to the state and ethnic solidarity, little is known about the ‘bottom-up’ variant, which focuses on people’s interest in the state’s and political leaders’ care for the masses. South Korea’s ‘Candlelight Revolution’ of 2016/17 ignited a national protest against the abuse of power by then-President Park Geun-Hye, the unfair distribution of wealth, and changes to Korean culture. This article explores grassroots’ expressions of bottom-up nationalism by analysing YouTube speeches from the Candlelight rallies. Protesters criticized the corruption and abuse of power by Korean leaders, which were seen to perpetuate the structure of injustice for decades. Some aspects of the Korean cultural contexts were politicized by national leaders, such as conservative leaders labelling their critics ‘commies’. By contesting the structure and culture of Korean society, protesters transformed themselves into social actors at the personal level and then called for long-term rather than temporary remedies at the societal level. By espousing ‘calculated nationalism’, protesters illustrated their interest in what they can get from the Korean nation-state, rather than what they can do to the state.

Home Team Effect and Opinion Network after the Sewol Ferry Disaster: A mixed-method study of the influence of symbol and feedback on liberal versus conservative newspapers’ negative opinions

Studies on the symbol and feedback effects on the opinion based on the theory are lacking. Acknowledging that the media express their stance and opinion and that negative opinions are critical to policy change, this paper fills the gap in the literature by illustrating and comparing the effects of emotional and cognitive symbols and positive and negative feedback on the liberal and conservative newspapers’ negative opinions of South Korean President Park Geun-hye’s administration (Park administration) after the Sewol Ferry sank. This study used qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze the archival data, including 424 newspaper editorials and economic data published from April to December 2014. Multiple regression analyses were conducted following a content analysis of newspaper editorials, and network analysis was used to analyze the data. The results mostly supported the hypotheses that symbols and feedback affect the negative opinion on the political discourse, with new findings that deviate from the existing theories. The emotional symbols exerted a stronger influence on the negative opinion compared to cognitive symbols, regardless of the newspaper’s stance. The political system’s response to the positive and negative feedback was not definite; instead, it varied depending on the situation and newspaper perspective. The liberal newspaper responded to symbols and feedback more sensitively compared to the conservative one under the conservative administration. The conservative newspaper expressed more lenient negative opinions towards the conservative administration than the liberal newspaper, supporting the home team effect. These findings have practical and theoretical implications for future studies, highlighting the application of opinion networks in social science.

The carrot and the stick: China's wedging against South Korea during the US–China competition

ABSTRACT In the midst of an intensifying US–China competition, China has adopted various policies to deal with the expanding US-led security network encircling it. As one endeavour, China has implemented a wedge strategy to weaken the US-led security coalition. This study focuses on one case of China's wedging against South Korea to disturb the US-South Korea alliance. This wedging strategy against the Park Geun-hye Administration was composed of two distinct approaches: a reward-based general wedging to prevent South Korea from tilting toward the US, and a coercion-based issue-specific wedging to divide them primarily by disturbing the deployment of THAAD in Korea.

한중 우호관계 발전을 위한 인문교류의 방향성

South Korea should continue its friendly relations with China for economic, geopolitical and security reasons. As China continues to compete with the United States for global hegemony, it is in its interest to maintain friendly relations with South Korea. In line with these interests, under the Park Geun-hye administration, China and South Korea issued a joint statement on the future vision of Korea and China, formalizing active bilateral exchanges centered on humanities. However, there is a subtle difference between the two countries in terms of the humanities exchange agreed upon in the statement. While Korea views the concept of humanities as a broad approach to human exchanges that encompasses traditional and popular culture, China focuses on traditional culture and is opposed to popular culture exchanges. The two countries have not been able to come to a mutual agreement on this issue. For friendly relations with China, Korea should continue humanities exchanges through a public diplomatic approach rather than a hard power competition. If so, it would be easiest to approach humanities exchanges based on traditional culture in the same flow as China's internal and external policies. Of course, there is a risk of cultural appropriation. However, humanities exchanges are an inevitable part of China-ROK diplomacy. In that case, we should start with traditional cultural exchanges that China can easily accept and gradually expand the scope. And it would be better to allow Korean pop culture-based content to penetrate China naturally, not through a policy approach.

텍스트 마이닝을 활용한 대학생 중소기업 취업 주요 이슈 분석

This study conducted text mining analysis using news data to objectively evaluate the effects of various policies, such as support for college student and small business employment, implemented during the tenures of past presidents. After collecting a total of 13,939 news articles, preprocessing such as removal of stop words was performed, and keyword analysis and correlation analysis were conducted. The news data was collected from 'Big Kinds' of the Korea Press Foundation. The main results analyzed are as follows: initially, a high-level analysis of the entire period showed that 'jobs' were the most frequently mentioned, followed by 'large companies', 'Seoul', 'workers', and 'job seekers'. Secondly, the yearly word cloud analysis results showed that President Moon Jae-in was associated with Covid-19, manufacturing, subsidies, minimum wage, in that order. President Park Geun-hye was associated with 'workers', youth, subsidies, manufacturing, in that order. President Lee Myung-bak was associated with 'unemployed', manufacturing, vocational high schools (Meister schools), college students, in that order. Thirdly, the TF-IDF analysis revealed distinct differences according to the timing of presidential changes. Additionally, among keywords related to government policies, terms such as National Employment Support System, Tomorrow Learning Credit, and Employment Encouragement Allowance emerged. Through this, it was possible to confirm that these support programs are mentioned in relation to college student employment in small businesses among various government support initiatives.

25년간의 조기 영어교육 관점 변화

Objectives This study analyzed the changes and direction of early childhood English education (ECEE) according to changes in English education policy by analyzing newspaper articles from the conservative newspaper Chosun Ilbo and the progressive newspaper Hankyoreh from the introduction of English curriculum in 1997 to 2022.
 Methods For this purpose, the study utilized historical research methods based on historical data. By searching for the term ‘early childhood English education,’ 285 articles from Chosun Ilbo and 205 articles from Hankyoreh were collected. These were then classified using Bӧhm's (2004) three-step coding method: open coding, axial coding, and selective coding.
 Results The findings reveal a direct impact of changes in English education policies on ECEE. The periods of Noh Moo-hyun and Lee Myung-bak’s governments saw the highest number of newspaper articles on ECEE in both Chosun Ilbo and Hankyoreh, indicating active discussions on the subject. Despite political transitions, this era witnessed the expansion of English education, introducing diverse methods and media for ECEE. However, the English education normalization policies implemented by Park Geun-hye and Moon Jae-in’s administrations proved ineffective due to the prohibition of after-school English classes for kindergartens, daycare centers, and first and second-grade elementary students. This highlights the influence of government policies on the ECEE landscape.
 Conclusions Chosun Ilbo and Hankyoreh exhibited contrasting viewpoints on ECEE, with the conservative Chosun Ilbo and progressive Hankyoreh presenting divergent perspectives. These distinct viewpoints offer valuable insights for future research in the field.

Derivation of Key Attributes and Clusters of Korean Taekwondo Policies and Systems on Social Media: Comparative Big Data Analysis Based on Regime Change

This study analyzed the key attributes and clusters of policies and systems of Korean Taekwondo based on Park Geun-Hye and Moon Jae-in’s regime changes using big data, including 8,030 data points on social media over a period of 8 years. Frequency analysis, term frequency inverse document frequency analysis, and degree centrality analysis were performed using TEXTOM 4.5. In addition, a convergent and correlation analysis was performed using UCINET 6 to visualize related words and analyze clusters. Frequency, term frequency inverse document frequency, and degree centrality analyses revealed 30 high-order terms. A convergence of iterated correlations analysis of the derived words identified three common clusters: improvement, problem, and support. In addition, there were two distinct clusters in the Park Geun-hye government (research and sports policy), and three in the Moon Jae-in government (interview, thoughts, and athlete). The Korean government attempted to improve and address problems related to policies and systems for the development of Taekwondo. However, as Taekwondo policies and systems were implemented from different perspectives by each regime, systematic policies and systems could not be implemented.

Minimum Wage Hike and Multinational Enterprises' Employment: Firm-Level Evidence from South Korea

This study examines the impact of a consecutive double-digit hike in Korea's minimum wage from 2018 to 2019 after the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye as an exogenous shock on the employment of multinational enterprises (MNEs). Notably, this topic has received limited attention in extant literature. Using a firm-level dataset covering the period 2006-2020, we find that MNEs respond to increases in the minimum wage by reducing their total employment size, including both regular and temporary workers. Furthermore, the effects are heterogeneous and depend on the participation of international trade and strategic partnerships. Our findings indicate that the minimum wage policy can even lead to a decrease in high-quality jobs within high-productivity companies, underscoring the need to adjust the pace of such increases to mitigate their side effects on the labor market.

Foreign policy consequences of democratic backsliding: the case of the Comfort Women Agreement in 2015

Recent studies have documented the profound effects that democratic backsliding generates on various realms of governance. However, foreign policies remain an exception in this trend despite the notable emergence of non-traditional foreign policy positions backsliding governments around the world took in recent years. To address this gap, this paper examines South Korea’s policy toward Japan during its recent period of democratic backsliding, focusing on the making of the Comfort Women Agreement in 2015. The case study reveals that the Park Geun-hye government (2012-2017) pursued a policy position that defied social and institutional constraints. The paper suggests that this case represents how democratic backsliding can destabilize foreign policies.

Protectors of liberal democracy or defenders of past authoritarianism?: authoritarian legacies, collective identity, and the far-right protest in South Korea

ABSTRACT Between 2016 and 2019, South Korean conservatives organized a movement called the T’aegŭkki Rallies to oppose the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye and to protest against President Moon Jae-in’s administration. This movement is puzzling for its timing, demographic composition, and rhetorical choices. Through in-depth interviews with rally participants and non-participants, I illustrate that a collective identity, shaped by authoritarian socialization, strengthened with positive memories about an authoritarian past, combined to mobilize rally participants. Curiously, rally participants saw themselves as defenders of liberal democracy, protecting South Korea against progressive forces seeking to turn the country into a communist state. However, my interviews revealed that they were, in fact, trying to protect the authoritarian past. In this manner, South Korea’s authoritarian legacy entrenches ideological polarization and hampers common understandings of democratic citizenship.

도시재생사업의 성과측정에 관한 연구

The urban regeneration project started under the Park Geun-hye administration and was promoted more heavily as a New Deal project under the Moon Jae-in administration. However, as the urban regeneration project progressed, problems arose that residents could not feel due to poor implementation performance and low execution ability. Accordingly, in this study, in order to establish and achieve the goals of the urban regeneration revitalization plan, a management system and performance indicators for monitoring, evaluation, and feedback are presented to systematically and comprehensively manage everything from plan establishment to performance and effect derivation, and a resident satisfaction survey to measure performance. We conducted an investigation. In order to accurately measure performance, the ‘Comprehensive Performance Index’ presented by the central government was used as a common indicator, and the ‘Local Government Performance Index’ was comprehensively analyzed and used as an auxiliary indicator. In this study, research was conducted targeting the ‘Jeonju Station Area Urban Regeneration Area’, which is currently under construction, to select indicators for performance measurement, and practical data was presented in relation to the research method.

Left-wing nationalist-populist movement and identification: A psycho-political analysis of the “comfort woman” statue movements in South Korea

Sonyosang (girl statue in Korean) is a bronze statue symbolizing “comfort women,” the estimated 80,000 to 200,000 women physically, mentally, and sexually exploited by the Japanese Empire during WWII. As a backlash against the 2015 ″comfort women” agreement between the South Korean and Japanese governments, Koreans have installed 384 girl statues across South Korea. Based on ethnographic research that I conducted in South Korea between 2019 and 2021, including in-depth interviews with Korean activists who raised funds for or participated in creating, installing, and managing girl statues in South Korea, this research examines how the girl statue movement in South Korea has developed into a left-wing nationalist-populist movement and how affective identification with the statue generates a populist identity. To this end, this research firstly discusses how former President Park Geun-hye's undemocratic political measures recall the memory of minjungism (Korean populism) that led the pro-democracy movement in the 1980s, enabling Korean nationalist leftists' demands to form a chain of equivalence in the girl statue movement. Secondly, relying on Melanie Klein's theory of identification, this article examines how the ‘people’ is constituted through affective forms of identification with the girl statue. By doing so, this article demonstrates that the growth of the girl statue movement into a left-wing nationalist-populist movement blurs boundaries between the psychological, the personal, the national, and the (geo)political.

한국의 청년정책 흐름과 향후 방향

The purpose of this study was to examine Korean youth policies of each regime from the early 2000s when youth problem became an issue to the present and, using news data, to analyze youth and youth policies of each regime through big data analysis. The period was divided into ① Roh Moohyun regime (2003/03 - 2008/02), ② Lee Myungbak regime (2008/03 - 2013/02), ③ Park Geunhye regime (2013/03 - 2017/04), and ④ Moon Jaein regime (2017/05 - 2022/04). The ‘Youth’ of each regime was analyzed, and the ‘Youth Policy’ was also analyzed for the Moon Jaein and Yoon Seokyeol regimes, the period when the Youth Basic Act was institutionalized into law. Based on the analysis results, plans and directions for the development of youth policies were suggested, including (1) the level of interest in ‘Youth’ and ‘Youth policies’, (2) youth participation and communication, (3) efforts by central government departments and local governments, and (4) comprehensive and comprehensive establishment and promotion of policies.
 This study contributed to this field by examining and summarizing the change and flow of social interest in youth and youth policies by regime over the past 20 years and, through big data analysis, suggesting development plans and directions for youth policies. Research on youth policy has a short history since it began before and after the enactment of the Basic Youth Act in 2020. For the development of youth policy, many studies on various topics are required.

Electoral Politics and Old-Age Pension Reform in South Korea

This article explores the political underpinnings of pension reforms in post-democratization South Korea. Contrary to the view of the traditional literature on East Asian welfare states, we argue that electoral competition plays an important role in driving pension reforms, as tax-based old-age cash transfers were initiated by conservative parties, and implemented under the conservative government of Park Geun-hye in South Korea. When older voters comprise the core constituency of the conservative party and electoral competition is intense between liberals and conservatives, the conservative party is likely to promote social policy that targets the elderly in general, and the expansion of pension benefits in particular. Our case study of electoral competition in South Korea reveals that the conservative party’s electoral incentives to maximize their core voters’ support, drove the introduction of a tax-based, old-age basic pension.

KEBIJAKAN LUAR NEGERI KOREA SELATAN TERKAIT KERJA SAMA PERTUKARAN INFORMASI MILITER PADA TAHUN 2016

This study aims to analyze President Park's decision in formulating the GSOMIA (General Security of Military Agreement) cooperation. It is carried out using descriptive qualitative methods and secondary data collection techniques from literature studies, and relies on the Decision-Making Process theory of Richard C. Snyder which looks at the subjective factors of the main decision makers. This study shows that for the first time, South Korea and Japan managed to reach an agreement on military information exchange cooperation (GSOMIA) in 2016. After being delayed for four years, President Park Geun-Hye insisted on realizing GSOMIA in the midst of a crisis due to public rejection. It was found through policy analysis related to the formulation of GSOMIA from the South Korean point of view that President Park's perspective was shaped by several factors. Factors originating from internal South Korea are President Park's desire to increase South Korea's military capabilities. Meanwhile, the external factor that became the reason for the realization of GSOMIA was President Park's desire to protect the country from threats.

Higher Expectations, Greater Disappointment: Ambivalent Sexism and Backlash After the Impeachment of the First Woman President of South Korea

ABSTRACT When the first female president of a country is impeached, how does the disgraceful exit shape people’s memory of her? Does sexism play a role in such retrospective evaluations? Do the voters who supported her remain loyal, or do they withdraw their support due to disappointment? This article utilizes the impeachment of Park Geun-hye of South Korea as a case to answer these questions. Using a public opinion survey conducted three years after the 2016 impeachment, I demonstrate that hostile sexism played a role in the negative retrospective evaluations of Park, while benevolent sexism did not. Moreover, those who voted for Park in the 2012 presidential election expressed more negative retrospective evaluations of Park than those who did not vote for her, suggesting a backlash effect. Voters who had high expectations of the first female president could experience deep disappointment when the historic first failed to meet their expectations.

The Conditional Effects of Natural Disasters on Public Approval of the President

Do natural disasters affect presidential approval ratings? In this study, we argue that in South Korea this relationship is conditional on regional partisan cleavages. Since partisanship induces perceptual biases among distinct social groups, we expect that (1) the president’s co-partisans will not blame their president even if the government fails to prevent or mitigate damage from natural disasters, and (2) human and economic losses from disasters, or delivery of disaster relief aid, may boost approval ratings in partisan strongholds. We test these hypotheses using South Korea’s Park Geun-hye and Moon Jae-in administrations. The results of vector auto-regressions show that regional partisanship toward the incumbent significantly influences job approval ratings in the wake of natural disasters. While public opinion in metropolitan areas was not affected by disaster losses, both presidents’ approval rose after disasters—typhoons and windstorms, in particular—struck their strongholds in the southeastern part of the country.

Parliamentary Dress

Parliamentary Dress

How does news exposure shape citizens' perceptions of and behavioral responses toward corruption?: information acquisition, blame attribution, and behavioral response

AbstractThis paper mainly deals with the relationship between citizens' levels of news exposure and their behaviors toward the president's corruption scandal in South Korea. In particular, we examine how an individual's level of news exposure affected his/her level of political information about the corruption scandal, perception of then President Park Geun-hye's responsibility for corruption, and participation in anti-Park protests or counter-protests. In this paper, we argue that more exposure to consistent news reports of the president's corruption increases the amount of information citizens with different political dispositions have in common. The more their sets of political information overlap, the closer their perceptions and behavioral choices regarding a corruption scandal are likely to be.

Political Pathways and Performance of Women Opposition Leaders in Indonesia and South Korea

While some world regions have seen women opposition leaders with no ties to political families rise to national leadership, in East Asia, women opposition leaders who ascend to national executive positions have been largely limited to the wives, daughters, or sisters of prominent male politicians. Locally, however, there have been some broadening and diversification of women who seek and win executive office through oppositional politics. Given the small number of women opposition leaders who have gained leadership positions in the government, this article develops an interpretive study of the relationship between becoming “critical actors” and doing “critical acts” as women opposition leaders. Using four illustrative cases of women who have pursued executive power through oppositional politics, this article questions whether and how the variation in women’s pathways affects their exercise of power in Indonesia and South Korea, two young though consolidating democracies in East Asia. Drawing on the biographies and policies of two presidents (Megawati Soekarnoputri and Park Geun-hye) and two mayors (Tri Rismaharini and Kim Soo-young) it shows that local women opposition leaders use their executive leadership to initiate and implement public policies, unlike their national counterparts whose pathways and performance are intertwined with family background. By doing so, the article sheds light on the complex nexus between political pathways and performance of women opposition leaders.