Human-Centered Challenges to Korean Democracy

In this chapter, the author examines the quality of democracy from a governance perspective, investigating developments in Korea during the last three decades. Howe complements a democratic governance perspective with elements of a human security perspective that lets him explicitly focus on the dimensions of freedom and equality. In a first step, he discusses various perspectives on democracy in the literature to come up with a set of quality criteria that go beyond mere procedural democracy and emphasize the actual practice of equal rights, opportunities, and the guarantee of the rule of law, accountability, participation, and competition. According to the “human-centered, entitlement rights-based approach” the author applies, one of the core responsibilities for those in power is to provide for the protection of the people so that they are free from fear, free from want, and can live in dignity. In the following sections, Howe examines developments in “achieving at least limited forms of procedural democracy, and good governance in terms of reconciling conflicting interests and generating collective good” between democratic transition in 1987 and the end of the liberal governments of Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun. This is followed by a similar evaluation of the conservative government of Lee Myung-bak, and that of his successor, Park Geun-hye, covering the period up to the year 2015. Howe then scrutinizes qualitative distributive shortcomings and human-centered challenges in Korea’s democracy guided by the three criteria of freedom from fear, freedom from want, and dignity.