CEAS ICEA Series: "Democratic Ceilings in East Asia: The Long Shadow of Nationalist Polarization"

Aram Hur is the Korea Foundation Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Missouri, where she is also Co-Director of the MU Institute for Korean Studies. Her research on national politics and democracy in East Asia has been published in academic journals such as the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Politics, and Journal of East Asian Studies. She was previously a CSIS U.S.-Korea NextGen Scholar, Provost Postdoctoral Fellow at NYU, and holds her Ph.D. from Princeton University.

Despite high scores on most democracy indexes, East Asian democracies are marred by the persistence of illiberal norms in party competition and turnover. What explains the apparent tolerance of such practices among political elites in otherwise consolidated democracies? We trace such weak institutional norms to nationalist polarization in the early phase of democratization. Party polarization takes on many forms, but when it centers on competing nationalist visions, the democratic state becomes an object of “all or nothing” capture. As factions compete in the name of nationalist survival, ends take precedence over means. Norms of forbearance and tolerance for the opposition that characterize high-quality democracies fall to the wayside. When democratization does not alleviate, but instead institutionalizes nationalist competition in an electoral context, it seeds endemic barriers to the development of strong democratic norms. We demonstrate the argument through a comparative case study of Taiwan and South Korea.