East Asian democracies have been hailed as model cases from the Third Wave of Democratization with its stable democratic performance. However, democratic development in these countries has stagnated in recent years, with some of them reaching the "democratic ceiling" and failing to improve democratic quality further. While the democratic institutions have consolidated in this region, democratic principles and practices at the grassroots level have faced lingering challenges in recent years. This panel examines some of the key challenges to democratic stagnation in South Korea and Taiwan, emphasizing the detrimental effects of authoritarian nostalgia, discrimination against "outsiders," and economic inequality.
The paper by Dr. Hannah Kim investigates attitudes among the youth towards democratic principles and discusses support for autocratic leadership and resistance to gender equality as the key sources of declining democratic support among the South Korean youth. The paper by Drs. Sanghoon Kim-Leffingwell and Hyein Ko examines one of the key sources of this rising support for authoritarianism by studying how the major newspapers use nostalgic images for the former dictator Park Chung-hee. With an image-as-data approach and a machine-learning method, the paper finds that conservative newspapers selectively publish pictures of the former dictator that can generate positive perceptions and nostalgic sentiment. Dr. Yu-hsien Sung addresses key questions in democratic development and judicial politics and argues that members of a judiciary engage in communication to protect the judiciary's reputation and that this communication fosters the public's trust in the judiciary. Her paper discusses how courts in new democracies can use communication strategies to bolster judicial trust. The research by Dr. Hsu Yumin Wang asks whether transitional justice (TJ) measures can intensify affective polarization. His paper focuses on the counter-effects of transitional justice measures and argues that TJ measures targeting a former autocratic ruling party can deepen partisan polarization in post-authoritarian democracies.