한국 민주정치 발전을 위한 정치제도적 조건 = 제도적 상보성을 중심으로

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Korean democracy is now more than 20 years old and there has been two power transitions between opposing parties. Most Koreans believe that there is no chance of the breakdown of Korean democracy and the turn to authoritarianism. Objectively, Korean democracy has been consolidated. At the same time, however, most Koreans are not satisfied with Korean democratic practice in the real world. Let's mention just several conspicuous examples: Adversarial confrontations are prevalent between the major parties resulting in political paralysis; presidents end up with their terms as another addition of a failed president; Representative democracy is in crisis; Political parties are subject to frequent realignments and they lack internal democracy within themselves; And people are sick and tired of physical violence of their representatives in the National Assembly. The present paper advances an argument that all these unwanted and unsatisfactory aspects of Korean democracy are based on an political institutional setting which lacks complementarity among its composing parts. Diverse institutions at different levels of the Korean political system provide conflicting incentives to politicians and produce non-conforming political activities, which prevents Korean democratic politics from moving toward an orderly and mature one and, instead, keeps political confrontation and paralysis as its repeating features. In order to overcome this state of affairs in Korean politics, we argue, constitutional amendments and political institutional reforms are to be carried out in such a way that institutional complementarity among Korean political institutions are strengthened. From this perspective, we propose 10 major institutional revisions that are needed in order to help the Korean presidential system of government function more smoothly and move towards a mature democracy.