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Full-Text Articles in Asian Studies
Civil Society And Local Activism In South Korea's Local Democratization, Yooil Bae, Sunhyuk Kim
Civil Society And Local Activism In South Korea's Local Democratization, Yooil Bae, Sunhyuk Kim
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Recent studies on causes of intergovernmental transformation in old and new democracies have found that decentralization is often the outcome of negotiations between national and local political interests. South Korea is commonly believed to be an exception because local elections and institutions introduced in the early 1990s were, by and large, the product of negotiations among political elites at the centre, without significant inclusion of local actors. However, this article attempts to explicate a hitherto ignored aspect of decentralization reform in Korea: the role of civil society and local activism in the politics of decentralization. In the 2000s, several ‘triggering …