Politics

This past June, President Bush made a series of telephone calls to leaders in the region calling on them to use their influence with Pyongyang in an effort to halt…

In September 2008, reports began to circulate in the world media that Chairman Kim Jong-il might be in serious condition after having suffered a stroke, and discussion on possible post-Kim…

The dramatic events of recent months—and, above all, North Korea’s second nuclear test and long-range missile launch—demonstrated once again that the Barack Obama administration and the international community at large…

Security relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea, like those of any other two closely entwined neighbors, glisten with the multiple facets of complexity. A number of structural conditions…

There is a long tradition of considering North Korean leaders’ public appearances as a potential source of information on the regime’s priorities (see for example: Haggard, Herman, and Ryu; Pyo and Hur; Kim and Lee).  We now have ten full years of this data for Kim Jong-un through the South Korea Ministry of Unification portal,…

In the 2022 presidential election, the conservative opposition candidate Yoon Suk-yeol won the race with a 0.8% margin. During the campaign, Yoon received endorsements from five former senior military officers who had served in the Moon administration. They attributed the endorsement to “[their] faith in Yoon’s national security policies,” including his controversial remark that Seoul…

In December 2021, Yoon Suk-yeol’s campaign released a short candidate clip. Looking and sounding just like the candidate, the ‘man’ in the video says, “hello, it’s ‘AI Yoon Suk-yeol,’ are you surprised at how much I look like [him]?”  Since then, the campaign would go on to release short clips of the candidate responding to…

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.…