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Given South Korea’s pivotal role in the security order of Northeast Asia, the US and China are expected to keep raising pressure on South Korea to distinctively position itself in their rivalry. As the rivalry intensified over the past years, Seoul’s strategy has been to accommodate both great powers and to avoid taking sides. The analysis of this chapter shows that this is consistent with the country’s positioning since the end of the Cold War. Structural, political, and broader societal factors combine to explain Seoul’s strategic choices. Today, the country’s policymakers face an international environment that increasingly constrains their strategic options. At the same time, they are confronted with shifts in domestic perceptions, turning increasingly critical of China. Combined, these trends suggest that South Korea will adopt more critical positions toward China in future. The 2022 election of a new South Korean president who has distinguished himself for his anti-Chinese rhetoric might be an early indication of this. For the time being, the country is, however, unlikely to go as far as to abandon its current hedging strategy and join the US in actively balancing against China.

In this paper, CSS’s Christine Eriksen, Florian Roth, Linda Maduz and Tim Prior propose a re-examination of the dynamic relationship between affluence and vulnerability —a complex association defined as the Affluence–Vulnerability Interface (AVI). A more nuanced understanding of the AVI can (1) problematize the notion that increasing material affluence necessarily has a mitigating influence on social vulnerability, (2) extend analysis of social vulnerability beyond low-income regions to include affluent contexts and (3) improve understanding of how psychosocial characteristics influence people’s vulnerability. In diesem Papier schlagen die CSS Forscher Christine Eriksen, Florian Roth, Linda Maduz und Tim Prior eine erneute Untersuchung der dynamischen Beziehung zwischen Wohlstand und Verwundbarkeit vor — eine komplexe Verbindung, die als Affluence-Vulnerability Interface (AVI) definiert wird. Ein nuancierteres Verständnis der AVI kann (1) die Vorstellung problematisieren, dass zunehmender materieller Wohlstand notwendigerweise einen mildernden Einfluss auf die soziale Verwundbarkeit hat, (2) die Analyse der sozialen Verwundbarkeit über einkommensschwache Regionen hinaus auf wohlhabende Kontexte ausdehnen und (3) das Verständnis dafür verbessern, wie psychosoziale Merkmale die Verwundbarkeit von Menschen beeinflussen. ISSN:0165-0009 ISSN:1573-1480

This chapter shifts the attention from the demand side of protest politics to the supply side: To what extent is protest mobilization a reflection of governments’ (repressive) politics? How do authorities handle and shape protest action? Importantly, all the previously considered factors, such as protest forms, claims, and actors, are included into the analysis of this chapter: We estimate a logistic model as to whether they make repressive action more likely. The analysis confirms the well-established argument in the protest-policing literature that governments repress protest by which they feel threatened, such as large and/or violent protests. We introduce a novel aspect by asking whether repression politics is ideologically driven and whether certain types of protesters are more likely to be repressed. The latter argument finds partial support: In Korea, workers, farmers, and political opponents are more likely to suffer from authoritarian repression than other protest actors. In Indonesia, this was the case when these types of actors got organized.

This chapter aims at assessing the role of actors defined in structural, socioeconomic terms, such as workers, farmers, and students, with the latter representing the middle class. The analysis reveals the key role played by students as actors who mobilize early in the democratization process and push for topics relevant for regime change. The extraordinarily high student mobilization in Korea and Indonesia, which is missing in Thailand, explains, to a considerable extent, the variation in overall mobilization levels; mobilization levels are high and quickly become regime-threatening in Korea and Indonesia, but not in Thailand. In addition to their structural disposition, actors’ organizational capacities have proved useful in explaining time—and country-specific mobilization patterns.

This book wants to explain when, during the democratization process, protest erupts, why it takes the form it does, and why the government responds to it in the way it does. These are questions typically asked by social movement scholars. It is in this research field that we find a wealth of analytical tools that allow us to assess protest patterns. Eventually the interest lies in explaining the pressure that people are able to mount on the government during the transition process. Findings from social movement research suggest that there are regularities in contention and more specifically in what types of actors participate, when they engage in protest, and when their actions radicalize. This has implications for the study of regime change.

In the analysis of protest claims in Chapter 5, a basic distinction is made between regime-related political demands and all other demands. The former type has been found to be, in large parts, responsible for the escalation of protest, as observed in democratizing Korea and Indonesia: before major political concessions in the democratization process are made by the power holders, general claims against the authoritarian government and demands for the extension of political rights are particularly prominent among protesters. Also important for the overall mobilization, but highly contingent on the specific context, are calls for more civil liberties. In Thailand, where overall levels of protest are steadier, different types of protest claims are more evenly distributed over time; we do not observe the spreading of contention from one issue area to another, as is the case in Korea and Indonesia.

Chapter 9 summarizes the findings of the book, discusses their theoretical and policy implications, and concludes. Based on the present analysis, we suggest making a conceptual distinction between dynamic and non-dynamic transitions. In dynamic transitions, the authoritarian government faces massive multi-dimensional pressure, which is related to quick changes in the quantity and quality of protest mobilization. We argue that cross-country variation in the composition of actors and their interaction with the government help explain why we see dynamic transitions in some places and not in others. Lastly, we discuss possible implications that the type of transition, i.e., dynamic vs. non-dynamic, may have for the quality and durability of a resulting democratic rule.

Chapter 4 explores in more detail the organization of protest and the various forms of mobilization during regime change. The results in this chapter suggest a key role for spontaneous protest. In Korea and Indonesia, the emergence of spontaneous protest, which is being spurned and supported by more organized protest and vice versa, occurs early in the democratization process and constitutes the bulk of total protest when it escalates shortly before regime change. It is this type of spontaneous protest that is closely associated with radicalization in protest forms: we found spontaneously organized protesters to be more likely to use confrontational and violent actions than more organized protesters. These radical forms of protest were widespread in democratizing Korea and Indonesia, and rather rare during the Thai transition. However, the most used strategy in all three democratizing countries was a more moderate form of protest, i.e., demonstrations. This form allows for broad participation of the masses.

Chapter 2 prepares the ground for the analytical chapters to follow. It introduces some key theoretical concepts that (re-)appear in every chapter in one form or the other. In a further step, it presents a discussion of the case selection, which is followed by an overview of the data and methods used in the book. For each of the countries under study, i.e., Korea, Thailand, and Indonesia, we identify the key historical episode in which democratic institutions have been created or significantly reshaped. The analysis is based on a comparison of these episodes. The method of data collection and analysis employed in this book is protest event analysis, as developed by social movement researchers.

Chapters 6 and 7 focus on the actors of contention and how the composition of actors relates to the dynamics of contention examined in the previous chapters. The theoretical argument in Chapter 6 follows democracy research, which highlights the role of civil and political society in providing independent organization and leadership. Political actors and, in particular, political organizations, such as parties, are found to hold a leading position in mobilization during regime change. This could be seen in political parties’ high overall participation, their well-timed actions vis-a-vis the democratization process, and the frequent regime-related claims they made. This holds for all three countries. But in terms of actor types and claims, mobilization in Korea was the most political, and mobilization in Thailand the least political. This is also true when considering claims of civil society actors who, overall, intervened later in the democratization process and were generally less political as compared to political parties.

How does globalization affect individuals and their perceptions and policy preferences? This paper uses new developments in international trade theory to propose a new way of conceptualizing and measuring the extent to which an individual can be characterized as globalization winner or loser. We argue that the distributional effect of exposure to international competition is conditional on individuals’ ability. Low-ability workers exposed to the international economy face lower wages and higher risk of unemployment, and can therefore be characterized as globalization losers. In contrast, high-ability workers receive higher wages when they are exposed to international competition are therefore identified as globalization winners. To illustrate the usefulness of this approach for political scientists, the paper revisits the debate about the determinants of social policy preferences. Using cross-national survey data from 16 countries we show that globalization has significant and heterogenous individual-level effects. Exposure to globalization increases risk perceptions and demands for more income redistribution among individuals with low levels of education (as a proxy for ability), but decreases these perceptions and demands among highly educated respondents.