Noting the growing importance of online platforms, this paper discusses the rise and development of the platform economy in Korea, defining platforms as a business model and arguing that the platform economy requires financing, an environment for Internet use and users, services, and content. Many believe that the platform economy's development is a natural outcome of technical innovation. However, the platform economy was created by the interplay of government and corporate strategies under certain historical conditions. In Korea, the platform economy developed after the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Presenting the IT industry and venture businesses as a solution to the crisis, the government helped finance venture companies through intensive investment and enhanced the strategy of building information and communication infrastructure. Platform companies suffered from the lack of content and services to provide; however, they quickly built web portal platforms with Korean specificities by copying and benchmarking personal computer communication services.

Recent colonial compensation lawsuits reflect the metamorphosis of historical grievances in collective public memory into tort claims in private law. This article provides a synthetic view of the nexus of colonial law and history in South Korea–Japan relations, focusing on cross-border litigation brought by former forced laborers and victims of sexual servitude known as “comfort women” during World War II. The concept of public policy (ordre public) in Korea, which has colonial origins, has long served law courts as the standard for deciding the validity of a juristic act. But of late heavy reliance on the general clauses of law in legal proceedings has risked turning history and law into handmaids of national spirit, muddling historical accountability and legal liability. Improvement of South Korea–Japan ties should start from a more accurate understanding of colonial laws and a rounded appreciation of their shared legal history.

South Korea's persistent enmity towards its erstwhile colonizer Japan has been a compelling topic of East Asian international relations scholarship for decades. This article argues that the historical evolution of South Korea's democracy offers a vital and overlooked piece of this puzzle. Given that it emerged from one of the most virulently anti-communist dictatorships of the Cold War period, in a society facing an ongoing threat from communist North Korea, any left-of-center opposition movement faced an uphill battle against severe anti-communism. In such circumstances, the only way for a leftist opposition party to survive was by pitting its stronger anti-Japan reputation against conservatives’ anti-communism. After South Korea's democracy stabilized, liberals tried and failed to overturn the anti-leftist institutions left over from the Cold War and then sought equilibrium through parallel rhetoric targeting pro-Japanese elements. Today, neither left nor right can afford to allow a final amicable settlement with its respective target of antagonism. Through analyses of domestic political rhetoric targeting alleged pro-Japanese or pro-communist elements, this paper demonstrates how these competing antagonisms achieved an uneasy equilibrium that undergirds South Korean political dynamics to this day.

This article discusses queer and transgender voices that took part in the South Korean Candlelight Protests of 2016–17 but became sidelined during the special election that followed Park Geun-hye's impeachment. Drawing from theories of queer temporality and feminist critiques of homogenous time, the article argues that idioms of postponement (najunge) and prematurity (sigisangjo) have significantly shaped liberal political discourses regarding the timing and timeliness of social change and minority politics in South Korea. These normative idioms of temporality articulate the stakes of being out of place in time.

This study analyzes political polarization among the South Korean elite by examining 17 years’ worth of subcommittee meeting minutes from the South Korean National Assembly's standing committees. Its analysis applies various natural language processing techniques and the bidirectional encoder representations from the transformers model to measure and analyze polarization in the language used during these meetings. Its findings indicate that the degree of political polarization increased and decreased at various times over the study period but has risen sharply since the second half of 2016 and remained high throughout 2020. This result suggests that partisan political gaps between members of the South Korean National Assembly increase substantially.

This paper explains how South Korea's democracy has controlled the military since 1993. It reveals why the overpowered military has not faded even after the eradication of Hanahoe and the consolidation of democracy in South Korea in its aftermath. The democratic control over the military is examined focusing on: (1) budget, personnel, organization; (2) the judicial system; (3) security and defense policy; (4) personnel affairs, roles, and responsibilities; and an explanation based on laws and institutions, the strategy of key actors, and historical conditions of military confrontation. Under South Korea's democracy, the military budget, personnel, and organization are only partially controlled, leaving military commanders with jurisdiction over the military's judicial system. This is a result of legal and institutional limitations, as well as resistance from the Ministry of National Defense (MND) and the military. In matters of security and defense policy, the president has taken the initiative to revitalize obsolete systems through political compromise with the military. The primary means for the president to control the military has been the personnel management of the MND and the military. The military is likely to pledge its allegiance to the regime instead of citizens because the former has control over personnel affairs, which has frequently led to unofficial private groups of military officers and their political interference. This case in South Korea shows that the way society controls the military sows the very seeds of risk and allows us to rethink the challenges in controlling the military in a democracy.

Many countries have taken steps to address employment insecurity by enacting employment protection legislation (EPL) for non-regular workers. Although the aggregate impacts of EPL reforms have been examined in the literature, less attention has been paid to the heterogeneous ways that different types of employers respond to these reforms. In this paper, we seek to shed additional light on the impact of non-regular workforce protections by investigating the response of establishments to legal changes in Korea in 2007. We employ a difference-in-difference framework to explore which establishment characteristics predict that employers will convert non-regular workers to regular status. Results indicate that, in the short term, the Korean labor reforms led to increased conversions of fixed-term workers to permanent status. Establishments that have shifted risk onto workers via the use of performance pay are more likely to extend permanent status to non-regular workers. However, establishments that provide favorable employment conditions were less likely to convert. Unions play a double-edged role. Unions in large establishments with a wide range of occupational categories are associated with relatively greater conversion of outsiders to regular status, while unions in smaller, more resource-constrained establishments with a narrower occupational focus are associated with more exclusionary behavior.

In this article, I present a theory of conditional core-swing targeting that focuses on the competition for majority control in legislative elections to explain how presidents use their strong budgetary powers to manipulate the distribution of the national subsidy in South Korea. Presidents whose parties already possess a legislative majority are expected to favor core municipalities to strengthen the foundations of their majority constituency, whereas those who seek majority control are predicted to prioritize swing municipalities in an effort to cross the majority threshold. Presidents are also anticipated to respond to the electoral cycle by shifting subsidies to riskier municipalities when elections approach. Using a novel data set on national subsidy allocations that spans three decades, I find evidence in favor of the hypotheses. This article demonstrates that the beneficiaries of distributive favoritism are not fixed, and that politicians can engage in complex and varied targeting strategies to achieve their objectives.

This study investigates how International Relations (IR) as an academic discipline emerged and evolved in South Korea, focusing on the country's peculiar colonial and postcolonial experiences. In the process, it examines why South Korean IR has been so state-centric and positivist (American-centric), while also disclosing the ways in which international history has shaped the current state of IR in South Korea, institutionally and intellectually. It is argued that IR intellectuals in South Korea have largely reflected the political arrangement of their time, rather than demonstrate academic independence or leadership for its government and/or civil society, as they have navigated difficult power structures in world politics. Related to this, it reveals South Korean IR's twisted postcoloniality, which is the absence – or weakness – of non-Western Japanese colonial legacies in its knowledge production/system, while its embracing the West/America as an ideal and better model of modernity for South Korea's security and development. It also reveals that South Korean IR's recent quest for building a Korean School of IR to overcome its Western dependency appears to be in operation within a colonial mentality towards mainstream American IR.

The New Right movement that arose in the early 2000s in South Korea was a response to a change in ownership of Korean nationalist discourse during the preceding decades. Although nationalism was the preserve of the South Korean right wing from the trusteeship crisis in 1945 through the end of the Park Chung Hee regime, a historiographical revolt in the 1980s that emphasized the historical illegitimacy of the South Korean state allowed the Left to appropriate nationalism. With the loss of nationalism from its arsenal, the Right turned to postnationalist neoliberal discourse to blunt the effectiveness of leftist nationalist rhetoric. An examination of New Right historiography on the colonial and postliberation periods, however, shows that despite the recent change in conservatives’ stance on nationalism, a preoccupation with the legitimacy of the South Korean state remains at the center of right-wing historical narratives. The New Right represents old wine in new bottles.

What explains South Korean public opposition for refugees and does the public differentiate among groups? Although a sizable literature addresses perceptions of North Korean arrivals, few studies directly compare sentiment for this group to others. Using an original web survey with an embedded experimental design, we find clear greater support for accepting North Korean arrivals compared to both non-ethnic Korean refugees and Muslim refugees. Additional analysis finds clear majorities view Islam as incompatible with Korean values. Our results suggest the challenge of encouraging multiculturalism in the largely homogeneous country.

In Korean society, regionalism has deep historical roots and has had a great influence on elections. A historic event occurred in 2014 when a conservative party candidate, Lee Jung-hyun, was elected as a member of the National Assembly in Suncheon-si, Jeollanam-do, where liberal parties have been in the midst of powerful political influence. This was possible because voters responded to the candidate's appeal to vote based on benefits to the local economy, that is, securing greater funding from the central government. Exploiting the synthetic control method, this article identifies how this different choice has affected the budget of the local district. The results show that the community budget has increased dramatically, and a battery of robustness checks also supports these basic results. On the basis of the empirical evidence, the study suggests the possibility of overcoming a long-standing parochial regionalism in Korean politics through economic voting and its practical benefits.