Three phases of liberal democracy in South Korea: A transition from Confucian authoritarianism to post-authoritarian liberal democracy

The main political ideology of South Korea since World War II has been called a liberal democracy. The fundamental flaw in South Korean version of liberal democracy lies in the fact that it has never had a liberal tradition which was grounded by the market society and social contract. Particularly, the lack of social contract from the people's consent brought out the absences of rule of law causing legitimation crisis.;Given the absence of liberal revolution, the political history of South Korea struggled to find a new path to liberal democracy and this political path has been quite different from that taken in Western liberal societies whose central features were accountable leadership, rule of law, fair and free competition, pluralized socio-economic interest groups, and an open system for participation.;Two fundamental long-range alternatives exist for post-authoritarian regimes in the wake of the breakup of the Confucian authoritarianism. The first is to evolve into increasingly pluralistic societies. The alternative pluralist vision of democracy could provide a reconciliation of antagonism between elitist authoritarianism and participatory democracy.;The second is to evolve into a more comprehensive form of nationalistic participatory democracy with Marxian applications that reject individualism that is intrinsic to nurturing the development of liberalism.;Thus, the burgeoning South Korean version of post-authoritarian liberal democracy is on the brink of being domesticated either as a fixture for elitist-pluralist authoritarianism or as a victim of a Marxist participatory democracy. In short, the fledgling South Korean version of post-authoritarian liberal democracy is confronted with these three intermingled phases of liberal democracy while holding the Western liberal democracy in generally high esteem.;Conclusively, South Korean version of liberal democracy is neither elitist-pluralist authoritarianism nor Marxist participatory democracy but a complex hybrid of post-authoritarian liberal democracy. In other words, there is no dominant model of liberal democracy--either in theory or practice in searching for a type of liberal democracy that suit Korean political culture.