This is the eight piece in a series looking at how the issues identified in KEI’s annual “10 Issues to Watch for on the Korean Peninsula” series and other issues of note developed in 2022. The original “10 Issues” piece can be found here. Partisan shifts in Korea can give rise to subtle—and not-so-subtle—differences in Seoul’s…
January 3, 2023
In a previous post, we asked the question of whether the Korean electorate was becoming more polarized, looking at the ideological differences across all citizens and those who identified most strongly with the two major parties. Our findings were that politics was becoming somewhat more polarized, but more sharply among partisans than the general public.…
March 3, 2022
Korea’s democracy is clearly a success story. Along with Taiwan, it is one of the few Asian countries that transitioned to democratic rule in the 1980s and has sustained that trajectory without significant "backsliding" or reversion. Nonetheless, new concerns have emerged that Korean politics is becoming more polarized and thus vulnerable to the kinds of…