Polarized Politics in South Korea : Political Culture and Democracy in Partisan Newspapers

South Korea is one of the most successful cases of democratization and rapid economic development in the world. It shares one troubling problem with many other industrialized and democratic countries of the recent years: the increase of extreme polarization in the language and emotions of politics and society. However, Korea experienced this problem earlier than most of these countries. The turbulent democratization history created parties that have weak ideologies but wield deeply effective stories and strategies. The combination of these two traits creates a downwards spiral where the performance of moral superiority becomes the sharpest weapon, at the cost of the voters and the institutional role of the party system. The author points out that we need a standard for viewing this growing problem and argues that the traits of ideological polarization in language are not well understood. Using partisan newspaper text data from 1990 to 2014 and quantitative text analysis, this book collects the most typical meanings used by parties and partisans, analyzing why they exist and for which purpose. In the age of digital data and possibly restricted mobility, this book is a proposal for what the author calls “Computational Area Studies” and “Distant Fieldwork.”