Liberal democracy without a working class? Democratization, coalition politics, and the labor movement in South Korea, 1987--2006

Through a case study of South Korea from 1987 to 2006, this thesis investigates how political democracy has interplayed with the working class and influenced the labor movement to transform its characteristics; and secondly, what causal mechanisms mediated the relationship between democracy and labor, generating specific outcomes and positions of the labor movement in post-authoritarian Korean society.; The thesis builds on a class coalition approach by incorporating historical comparative studies on regime change and key notions in social movement studies such as political opportunity structure and the social movement field. While emphasizing the significance of the political economy of democratization and class structure like Rucschemeyer et al., it rejects their economic determinism directly relating class structures to class coalitions. Also, as opposed to Luebbert's argument, the study discloses that liberal democracy can be consolidated through diverse political trajectories and inter-class politics other than a lib-lab coalition, which is a consequence of the sequential interaction between political opportunity structure and the social movement field. In Korea, labor's position has been largely determined by the consolidation of liberal democracy through a liberal-civic coalition, in which labor's 'lib-lab strategy' has been fairly marginalized.; With slow opening of labor's corporate and political rights, Korean labor chose a 'social path' that maximized its disruptive power of production under export-oriented industrialization, which realized considerable redistribution. However, the social path of labor given a lagging and uneven incorporation of workers into industrial relations gradually became the main source of a new type of inequality and the polarization of the working class, which became highly problematic under the neo-liberal globalization of the Korean state.; This study, then, describes the interactions between democracy and labor in three distinctive phases: (1) the independent unions' formation against semi-authoritarian regression (1987--1992); (2) the labor movement's transformation during civilian regime reform politics and selective accommodation (1993--1996), and (3) the institutionalization of organized labor and the emergence of a new labor movement under liberal democratic consolidation and neoliberal globalization since 1998.