This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.

Despite the fact that socialist parties have proved to be a major political force across the world, this has not been the case in Asian countries. Socialism in South Korea is a quintessential example of this failure. Despite the existence of a socialist party and what would seem to be the right conditions for development, the Korean socialist tendency has failed to become a meaningful force in politics. This book explores why and under what conditions Korean socialism has failed to develop into a social democrat movement in the post-war period. Within the context of the integration of structural and agency factors, it goes beyond the generally accepted view that the left failed because of suppression by the state and proffers that the real reason why socialism failed lay with its inability to develop beyond revolutionary socialism and build a more pragmatic social democracy that could develop a broad alliance within Korean society. Also drawing on examples from Western Europe and Latin America, where left-wing forces have achieved power, this book will be of huge interest not only to students and scholars of Asian and Korean politics, but also socialism, comparative and international politics alike.

This two-volume work continues the series of election data handbooks published by OUP. It presents a first-ever compendium of electoral data for all the 62 states in Asia, Australia and Oceania from their independence to the present. Following the overall structure of the series, an initial comparative introduction on elections and electoral systems is followed by chapters on each state of the region. Written by knowledgeable and renowned scholars, the contributions examine the evolution of institutional and electoral arrangements, and provide systematic surveys of the up-to-date electoral provisions and their historical development. Exhaustive statistics on national elections and referendums are given in each chapter. Together with the other books of this series, Elections in Asia and the Pacific is a highly reliable resource for historical and cross-national comparisons of elections and electoral systems world-wide. The second volume of Elections in Asia and the Pacific covers the Asia-Pacific area, i.e. the 30 independent states of East Asia (including Japan), South East Asia and the South Pacific (including Australia and New Zealand).

We are told, time and again, that North Koreans are loyal to their leader, that they would do anything, even die for him, and that they are fiercely proud and nationalistic. But to an equal extent, we are told that they are oppressed, suffering, and ready to rise against the evil dictator. What do we know beyond or between these opposing assumptions? We are not well equipped with the conceptual tools that could lead us beyond the current securitization of our discourses on North Korea, while undercurrents of regarding North Koreans as less human continue in these discourses. This volume attempts to multiply the angles from which we can look at North Korea by reassessing the international environment in which it is placed, the process of production of its culture, and the historical paths it has followed. Due to the new approach the volume takes, reading these pages will be an eye-opening experience not only for experts, but also for lay readers and anyone interested in peace keeping in Korea, Northeast Asia, and beyond.

A unique survey of each country in the region. It includes an extensive collection of facts, statistics, analysis and directory information in one accessible volume.

While popular movements in South Korea rightly grab the headlines for forcing political change and holding leaders to account, those movements are only part of the story of the construction and practice of democracy. In Top-Down Democracy in South Korea, Erik Mobrand documents another part – the elite-led design and management of electoral and party institutions. Even as the country left authoritarian rule behind, elites have responded to freer and fairer elections by entrenching rather than abandoning exclusionary practices and forms of party organization. Exploring South Korea’s political development from 1945 through the end of dictatorship in the 1980s and into the twenty-first century, Mobrand challenges the view that the origins of the postauthoritarian political system lie in a series of popular movements that eventually undid repression. He argues that we should think about democratization not as the establishment of an entirely new system, but as the subtle blending of new formal rules with earlier authority structures, political institutions, and legitimizing norms.

This book describes the process of South Korea's search for a stable political system and analyzes the various factors that contributed to the failure of the successive Seoul regimes to legitimize themselves and institutionalize the structures they had erected.

South Korea: Challenging globalisation and the post-crisis reforms examines the major economic issues flowing from the Korean financial crisis of 1997 and covers such issues as industrial relations, macroeconomic sectors, the role of administrations, and corporates' globalisation process by over-expanded foreign direct investment. The chapters contained in this book are written by a wide variety of contributors, including a former government technocrat, president's advisory board member, plus leading Korean economy specialists. - Includes empirical surveys from the leading academics in Korea - Exclusively research methodology on each topic - First attempt to explain limited but historically important period economic policy