• Korean Journal of Legislative Studies
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.67-108
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• 2017

How well citizens are represented by their representatives holds critical importance in representative democracy. While previous studies of ideological congruence have largely focused on Western established democracies, there was not as much attention paid to young democracies including, South Korea. This article investigates ideological congruence in South Korea based on multiple survey data sources collected from 2002 to 2016. When it comes to unidimensional Left-Right ideology, the distance between citizens and governments, unlike its citizen-assembly counterpart, has widened since 2000 sending a negative signal to the norm of representative democracy. As to multidimensional issue positions, however, it turns out that ideological congruence in South Korea has varied along issues such as aids to North Korea and Welfare spending. These results provide both citizens and parties with some important implications. For citizens, they are required to distinguish which party or candidate is more representative of the issue they value the most beyond a simple Left-Right line; for parties, they are required to deal with how to represent their supporters as well as today's increasing independents by strengthening their organizational capacity and providing effective party programs.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.9-44
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• 2020

This article aimed to looked back at the 1960s, which were assessed to be 'the age of essays', to survey denotations of essays, amplified by the discourse antagonism surrounding 'essays' and the writings of philosophers. Kim Hyeong Suk, Ahn Byeong Uk, and Kim Te Gil were philosophy professors of Yonsei University, Soongshil University, and Seoul National University and writers of numerous essay collections of the 1960s. However, there have been very few studies conducted on them. This is because of old prejudices within literary history that primarily undervalue essays and practices that try to limit them as 'Literariness'. Essays of the 1960s became the flavor of the times based on democratic demands that attempted to objectify individual experiences and grounds that passed through the war and the April 19 Revolution. The language of philosophers was expropriated through the various senses of first person writing to readers of the times, which lacked civil culture and national morality. Deficits in public spheres of the 1950s and 1960s were filled by Kim Hyeong Suk's narrations of comfort and conquest based on historic experiences, Ahn Byeong Uk's logic of self-discipline and knowledge based on democracy, and Kim Te Gil's humor and introspection that objectified the lives of the petit bourgeois. However, as the essays of philosophers failed to connect with the public discourse of the age, they were unable to go as far as sparking or serving as a medium for civil culture in the 1970s. Regardless, as essays rose historically in the 1960s, thought was given to the characteristics of the 'essay' genre and in connection, to the merits and demerits of cultural history that possesses the language of philosophers.