Research On South Korea Democratic Transition

Democratic transition is the process that the political change refers to the democratic system as the goal. After World Warâ…¡, the choice of the political system in South Korea almost inclines toward the West World, and refers to the Western democratic model to establish its own political system. However, South Korea lacked the social, economic, cultural and many other preconditions which run off the democratic institutions at that time. In the 30 years of developing progress South Korea realized its democratic transition, established a framework of democratic politics and achieved a rapid economic development and overall social structure transformation. Among these, there are some common characteristics that the East Asian countries achieve the democratic transformation, such as the rapid economic development has brought changes in social structure, and thus to promote political restructuring, the Government is dominant in the process of economic development, and then the economic development has an important role in promoting the process of political transition; But in the other hand, South Korea has its unique characteristics, such as the growth of civil society, strong opposition forces, and the political transition result of the compromise between the Government and the opposition forces, and so on. As an East Asian country, the traditional political culture in East Asia is clearly a very important influence to South Korea's democratic transition, even in today; South Korean politics still can not get rid of authoritarian implications. At the same time as a typical example of the democratic transition in the world's wave of democratization, analyzing the characteristics of South Korea's democratic transition and its problems obviously has a great significance to the political developments in other countries.The article is mainly comprised of three parts except introduction. The first part of the article discusses the theoretical basis for democratic transition, and mainly consists of the concept of democracy, the concept of democratic transition. In this part we also detail the relevant theoretical models about the democratic transition study since 1980s. They are the modernization theoretical model, civil society theoretical model, the strategic choice theoretical model and the theoretical model of Huntington's democratization, which constitutes the study of the theoretical basis for South Korea's democratic transition.The second part of the article describes in detail the major South Korean democratic transition process, mainly including the political, historical, economic, cultural and international environment of South Korea's democratic transformation; after the analysis of the political environment, we describe the establishment of South Korea's authoritarian regime. The main features of South Korea's authoritarian are first economic development strategy, efficient bureaucracy organizational structure, a wide range of social mobilization mechanisms and the continued differentiation of the social structure. In the process of democratic transition, political elites played an important role. After the establishment of democratic institutions there are a series of related consolidation measures, such as the liquidation of authoritarianism, reform the army and the implementation of local self-government.The third part of the article discusses the inspiration of democratic transition in South Korea. Based on the analysis of the process of South Korea's democratic transition, we extract the features of South Korea's democratic transition, and analysis a rang of issues of South Korea's democratic transition, such as the constitutional system is relatively young so that it lacks of a solid; party politics is not mature enough; consortium politics always remain; political corruption is not eradicated; and regionalism prevailed, and so on. Summing up the democratic transformation of South Korea, the biggest draw is that the rapid economic development brought up by the growth of civil society, which is an important significance to other countries political developments.