Perspectives on Contemporary Korea 2025 | One Year after the Martial Law Declaration: Democratic Backsliding and Resilience in Korea and Beyond

December 5, 2025 | University of Michigan | Weiser Hall 1010

All times listed below are US Eastern Standard (Ann Arbor, Michigan) time. 

Friday, December 5

9:00 a.m.

            Breakfast – conference invitees

9:30 a.m.

Opening Remarks

Jenna Bednar (Co-chair, Year of Democracy and Civic Engagement, University of Michigan)

Juhn Ahn (Director, Nam Center for Korean Studies, University of Michigan)

9:40 a.m. - 11:50 a.m. // Panel 1

Chair: Joan Cho (Wesleyan University)

Part I 9:40 - 10:45 a.m.

Inbok Rhee (Yonsei University), “Hands-on Democracy: The Effects of Electoral Work on Trust and Democratic Attitudes”

Brandon B. Park (Chung-Ang University), “Who Support Martial Law in a Democracy? Lessons from South Korea”  

Discussants: Cesi Cruz (University of Michigan)

Part II 10:45 - 11:50 a.m.

Yeilim Cheong (University of Missouri), “Struggles that Strengthen: Why Some Opposition Successor Parties Endure While Others Falter”

Lucan Way (University of Toronto), “Capitalist Development and the Social Foundations of Democracy"

Discussants: John Kuk (Michigan State University)

11:50 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.

Lunch – conference invitees (Optional: Campus Walk)

1:00 p.m. - 3:20 p.m. // Panel 2

Chair: Myunghee Lee (Michigan State University)

Part I 1:00 - 2:05 p.m.

Joshua Byun (Boston College), "Just Tell Them You're Sorry! Assessing the Impact of Shaming on Support for Policies of Atonement in International Politics" 

Eun A Jo (College of William & Mary) and Yusaku Horiuchi (Florida State University), “South Korean Democratic Backsliding and American Public Perceptions of the Alliance”

Discussants: Jim Morrow (University of Michigan)

Part II: 2:05 - 3:10 p.m.

Laura Gamboa (Notre Dame University), “New Pathways of Democratic Erosion in Latin America”

Ji Yeon (Jean) Hong (University of Michigan), “Peril of Past Strengths: South Korea’s Conservative Party after Democratization”

Discussants: Stephan Haggard (UCSD, Zoom)

3:10 – 3:30 p.m.

Coffee Break

3:30 – 5:10 p.m. // Panel 3

Chair: Laura Gamboa, (University of Notre Dame)

Sanghoon Kim-Leffingwell (North Texas University), “Pixelated Authoritarian Nostalgia: The Use of Nostalgic Rhetoric of a Former Dictatorship in the Media”

Joan Cho (Wesleyan University), “The Curious Case of the Opposition in East Asia”

Myunghee Lee (Michigan State University), “Authoritarian-Led Democratization Revisited: Democratic Commitments of Authoritarian Successor Parties Since Democratization”

Discussant: Chris Fariss (University of Michigan), Ji Yeon (Jean) Hong  (University of Michigan)

5:10 – 5:20 p.m.

            Closing Remarks

6:00 – 8:00 p.m.

Workshop Dinner – conference invitees

Speaker Bios

Inbok Rhee is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Studies, jointly appointed at Underwood International College at Yonsei University. His research centers on African politics and the political economy of development, with recent work on economic voting, natural disasters, foreign investment, survey methods, and misinformation in Sub-Saharan Africa. His publications appear in leading outlets, including the American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, and Journal of Peace Research. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from UC San Diego.

Brandon B. Park is Associate Professor of Comparative Politics at Chung-Ang University in Seoul. His research examines democratic accountability and how citizens hold representatives responsible for policy performance in both liberal and illiberal settings. He previously taught at Soongsil University, the University of Reading (UK), and The College of New Jersey. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Missouri.

Yeilim Cheong is Assistant Professor in the Truman School of Government and Public Affairs at the University of Missouri. Her research focuses on Korea and the Asia-Pacific, examining how opposition groups evolve before and after democratization and how legacies of authoritarian rule shape young democracies. Her book project investigates why some former pro-democracy movements become durable, electorally successful parties while others fade. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from UC San Diego.

Lucan Way studies global patterns of democracy and dictatorship. He is the author of Revolution and Dictatorship (Princeton), which explains the durability of autocracies born of violent revolution, and Pluralism by Default (Johns Hopkins), which traces the rise of political competition in the former Soviet Union. His earlier book, Competitive Authoritarianism (Cambridge, with Steven Levitsky), helped shape research on hybrid regimes. He has published widely in leading journals and is Co-Director of the Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine.

Joshua Byun is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Boston College and a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at MIT (2025–26). His research focuses on grand strategy, alliance politics, and political violence, examining topics such as military alliances, preventive war, and the role of nuclear weapons. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in leading journals, including American Political Science Review and International Studies Quarterly. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago.

Eun A. Jo is Assistant Professor of Government at William & Mary and a fellow at Good Authority. She studies national storytelling and its implications for international relations in East Asia. Her research has been published in Comparative Political Studies and International Organization, earning multiple awards from the American Political Science Association. She holds a Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University.

Yusaku Horiuchi is the Syde P. Deeb Eminent Scholar in Political Science at Florida State University. His research uses experimental and observational methods to study foreign and global public opinion, Japanese politics, elections, and political methodology. He has published extensively in leading journals and has held academic appointments at Dartmouth College, the Australian National University, and the National University of Singapore. He earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from MIT.

Laura Gamboa is Assistant Professor of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. Her research focuses on political institutions, regime dynamics, and regime change in Latin America. Her book, Resisting Backsliding, examines how opposition actors respond to democratic erosion and has received awards from LASA and APSA. Her work has appeared in leading journals, including Comparative Politics and Journal of Democracy.

Ji Yeon (Jean) Hong is Associate Professor of Political Science and Korea Foundation Chair Professor of Korean Politics at the University of Michigan. She studies the political economy of authoritarianism in East Asia, including the legacies of authoritarian rule, political violence, and elite behavior. Her work has appeared in leading journals such as American Journal of Political Science and British Journal of Political Science. She received her Ph.D. in Politics from New York University.

Sanghoon Kim-Leffingwell is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of North Texas. His research examines authoritarian nostalgia, voter behavior, and the intersection of domestic and international politics in East and Southeast Asia. He employs methods including text and image analysis and experiments, and his work has appeared in leading journals such as Political Behavior and International Studies Quarterly. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Joan Cho is Associate Professor of East Asian Studies and, by courtesy, of Government at Wesleyan University, and Associate Editor (Northeast Asia) for Pacific Affairs. Her research focuses on authoritarianism, democracy, and social movements in Korea and East Asia. She is the author of Seeds of Mobilization: The Authoritarian Roots of South Korea’s Democracy (University of Michigan Press, 2024), and her work has appeared in leading journals and media outlets. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University.

Myunghee Lee is Professor of International Relations at James Madison College, Michigan State University. Her research focuses on authoritarian politics, democratization, protest, and foreign policy in East Asia, especially the Korean Peninsula and China. She is currently writing a book on authoritarian education and its post-democratization legacies in South Korea and Poland. Her work has appeared in leading journals, including International Security and Journal of East Asian Studies. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Missouri–Columbia.

Panel 1

Part I

Inbok Rhee (Yonsei University)

Hands-on Democracy: The Effects of Electoral Work on Trust and Democratic Attitudes

Unsubstantiated claims of electoral fraud can weaken perceived legitimacy even in established democracies. This study tests whether direct participation in election management can counter such distrust through experiential learning. We argue that first-hand involvement in electoral procedures fosters trust by revealing how institutional rules operate in practice. Using a two-wave panel survey conducted before and after the 2025 South Korean presidential election, we analyze citizen observers, party-nominated observers, and polling staff. Citizen observers were selected by lottery among applicants, creating an as-if random treatment that approximates a natural experiment. Participation increased satisfaction and trust in the National Election Commission and strengthened perceptions of fairness. It also produced modest gains in democratic attitudes. These findings show that experiential participation in election administration can build procedural trust and democratic resilience in contexts where electoral legitimacy is publicly contested.

Brandon B. Park (Chung-Ang University)

Who Support Martial Law in a Democracy? Lessons from South Korea

On December 3, 2024, South Korea faced an unprecedented political crisis with the declaration of martial law, sparking intense public debate and raising concerns about democratic stability. While martial law is typically associated with authoritarian regimes, its invocation in a consolidated democracy prompts critical questions about the conditions under which citizens justify extraordinary executive measures. This study examines the political attitudes shaping public support for martial law, focusing on affective polarization, delegative democratic attitudes (DDA), and political trust. Using original survey data from South Korea, we analyze how partisan animosity, preferences for strong executive leadership, and confidence in political institutions relate to attitudes toward martial law. The findings suggest that democratic backsliding is not solely a product of institutional erosion but can be reinforced by deep political divisions and public attitudes that favor executive dominance over democratic checks and balances. These dynamics challenge democratic resilience even in well-established democracies and may accelerate backsliding in newer democracies with weaker institutional trust. Strengthening institutional legitimacy and cross-partisan trust is thus essential for safeguarding democratic governance across diverse democratic contexts.

Part II

Yeilim Cheong (University of Missouri)

Struggles that Strengthen: Why Some Opposition Successor Parties Endure While Others Falter

What explains why some opposition successor parties (OSPs)—parties rooted in pro-democracy opposition groups or movements from authoritarian periods—develop into prominent political actors after democratization, while others struggle to do so? This paper argues that OSP development depends on both the legacies of authoritarian rule and the nature of the democratic transition itself. Specifically, OSPs emerging from negotiated transitions—where authoritarian successor parties (ASPs) tend to remain strong—face an uneven playing field that places them at a significant structural disadvantage. Yet, counterintuitively, these asymmetries often incentivize OSPs to invest more in long-term party building, thereby contributing to greater organizational development over time. In contrast, OSPs operating after rupture transitions—where authoritarian regimes collapse abruptly without a negotiated settlement—often lack the competitive pressures that drive sustained party-building efforts. In addition, OSPs' prior electoral experience and legacies of state repression can amplify or offset these dynamics by providing mobilizational resources. To test this argument, I use a mixed-methods approach that combines original party–election-level data covering nine young democracies in Asia with a case study of South Korea. Together, the findings suggest that OSPs often build durable strength over time, not despite, but because of, the structural and resource asymmetries inherited from authoritarian and transitional periods.

Lucan Way (University of Toronto)

Capitalist Development and the Social Foundations of Democracy

Panel 2

Part I

Joshua Byun (Boston College)

Just Tell Them You're Sorry! Assessing the Impact of Shaming on Support for Policies of Atonement in International Politics

Governments often “shame” international aggressors for failing to atone for historical crimes. A commonplace assumption is that such pressure works best when it comes from a broad coalition of states that represent victims of the aggression in question. We argue that the shamer’s identity affects mass support for atonement to former victims in ways that contravene received wisdom. Individuals vary their responses to foreign shaming based on their country’s preexisting relationship with the shamer and the strategic benefits they expect to accrue through apology and reparation. We test this relational logic through a survey experiment fielded in Japan, finding that shaming is more likely to increase public support for atonement when issued by the United States—a friendly state that was not victimized by Japan’s colonial aggression—than by China or South Korea, who were direct victims of Tokyo’s offenses and remain openly hostile toward Japan regarding its violent past.

Eun A Jo (College of Wiliam & Mary)

Yusaku Horiuchi (Florida State University)

South Korean Democratic Backsliding and American Public Perceptions of the Alliance

Conventional wisdom in political science suggests that democratic norms and institutions facilitate international cooperation. We argue, correspondingly, that democratic backsliding generates doubts about reliability and efficacy, thereby undermining the foreign public's support for cooperation with a backslider. Leveraging the case of the 2024 self-coup in South Korea, we conducted a survey experiment in the United States to examine this argument. We find that information about South Korean democratic backsliding, indeed, damages American perceptions of South Korea's reliability and efficacy, undermining American public support for the alliance. Further analyses show that this effect is robust across different frames: even when the self-coup and its aftermath are portrayed as evidence of democratic "resilience,’" American perceptions of South Korea are still harmed. These findings highlight how democratic backsliding can erode the public foundations of international security commitments, jeopardizing the stability of alliances.

Part II

Laura Gamboa (Notre Dame University)

New Pathways of Democratic Erosion in Latin America

Democratic erosion has become a leading global challenge. Literature conceptualizing, explaining, and assessing the magnitude of democratic backsliding, as well as research on how to resist it has boomed in the past decade. But as global attention has grown, so too have the forms that democratic erosion assumes. El Salvador has followed the classic executive aggrandizement playbook, but in México, autocratization has been more focused on securing partisan rather than personal dominance; in Perú, democratic backsliding has been led by the legislature; while in Guatemala it has been a coalitional endeavor involving economic elites, organized criminal groups, and judicial and prosecutorial authorities. To better understand these different pathways, in this CUP Elements, we develop a novel analytical framework that breaks down the dynamics of democratic backsliding allowing scholars to compare and explain episodes of autocratization according to their most important dimensions: 1) the actors that promote or resist it, 2) the strategies that autocratizers and oppositions employ, 3) the arenas of contention in which they struggle over democratic norms and institutions, and 4) the objectives that these different actors pursue in the promotion of or resistance to democratic erosion. Our work improves upon previous approaches analyzing different pathways of democratic backsliding, by paying attention to time and the dynamic interactions between autocratizers and their opponents. Incorporating concepts from the literature on contentious politics, our manuscript provides a better understanding of changes in the relevant actors, strategies, arenas, and goals that result from the interplay between those leading the erosion of democracy and those opposing it.

Ji Yeon (Jean) Hong (University of Michigan)

Peril of Past Strengths: South Korea’s Conservative Party after Democratization

What explains the success and failure of authoritarian successor parties? This paper claims that the persistence of ruling-elite dominance explains both the early success and the eventual decline of authoritarian successor parties in new democracies. Drawing on an original dataset of the prior occupations of all elected lawmakers, the analysis shows that South Korea’s conservative party maintained a highly elite-centered representatives throughout the democratic period. The composition of conservative party lawmakers' prior occupation remains similar after democratization. The only notable change observed was the change in the persecution elite from the military during the military dictatorship to prosecutors in a new democracy. With democratic consolidation, this ``doubling down" strategy on historical strengths became a constraint, culminating in repeated electoral defeats and political crises, including the impeachment of two conservative presidents. The findings highlight the paradox of authoritarian inheritance: the same elite structures that secure authoritarian strength and early post-authoritarian success can later constrain the party and accelerate decline.

Panel 3

Sanghoon Kim-Leffingwell (North Texas University)

Pixelated Authoritarian Nostalgia: The Use of Nostalgic Rhetoric of a Former Dictatorship in the Media

Democratic transition marks the end of former dictatorships, but many voters adopt nostalgic rhetoric and support politicians invoke nostalgia for the former regime. What contributes to the persistence of authoritarian nostalgia in many developing democracies? In this paper, we focus on the significant role played by the news media and investigate how they revisit and revise the past. Conservative media often aim at constructing favorable historical narratives of the former regime, and we explore how newspapers selectively portray different images of former dictators, with a focus on both the visual and textual representations. We draw on the case of South Korea, where nostalgic reference for Park Chung-hee’s dictatorship remains strong across democratic elections. We collect text and image data from Korean newspapers on the opposite sides of the ideological spectrum and compare how they differ in constructing memories of the former dictatorship and how such narratives vary over time. We employ semantic image clustering and text topic modeling and answer how newspapers narrate the past using both visual and textual messages. Findings suggest the lingering polarization in memory construction in a post-authoritarian country.

Joan Cho (Wesleyan University)

The Curious Case of the Opposition in East Asia

The existence of a strong opposition is typically seen as a good and even necessary condition for democracy. Yet the rise of the leftist opposition in East Asia—the former pro-democracy faction—has led to strange democratic consequences: failure to expand representation, intensifying zero-sum competition, and constitutional hardball, most stunningly demonstrated by South Korea’s martial law crisis. Why did the rise of a strong opposition fail to deepen democracy in East Asia? We show that in democracies driven by nationalist conflicts, the emergent “left-right” party system becomes polarized on a national identity axis, rather than programmatic axis. As the opposition strengthens into a real electoral challenger and eventually an opposition-turned-incumbent, it intensifies nationalist polarization, where the unique “state-seeking” properties of nationalism subvert the rules of the democratic game. We use the left in South Korea and Taiwan as a lens to critically re-evaluate the role of opposition in theories of democracy.

Myunghee Lee (Michigan State University)

Authoritarian-Led Democratization Revisited: Democratic Commitments of Authoritarian Successor Parties Since Democratization

Under what conditions do authoritarian successor parties (ASPs) make credible democratic commitments after a democratic transition? In this study, we argue that ASPs that initiate a democratic transition may attempt to reverse course if they perceive deepening democratization as a threat to their interests vis-à-vis the state. In particular, we focus on the degree of fusion between the party and the state. When fusion is strong during the authoritarian period, a transition to democratic rule orchestrated by the party tends to produce higher levels of tolerance by the ASP toward opposition pressures to reform state agencies. The party is more confident in preserving its access to the state through organizations built during the authoritarian period. Conversely, when party-state fusion is weak or absent, the party is less confident and therefore more likely to resist reforms of state institutions and, at some point, may withdraw its democratic commitments. We compare South Korea and Taiwan to substantiate our argument. This study contributes to the scholarship on authoritarian-led democratization by identifying the conditions under which autocrats cease to make credible democratic commitments.