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Introduction
In democracies, the extent to which a national leader can and should have power to govern his or her citizens has been a classical question in political science for a long time. However, since Fall 2017, this question has had new relevance as South Korea reels from the revelation of former President Park Geun-hye’s corruption and abuse of power; the large public protest against her, the so-called Candlelight Revolution; the impeachment in March 2017 and subsequent conviction of former President Park; and the early presidential election on May 9, 2017. Throughout these dynamic political events, even though South Koreans feel proud of civic-minded citizen’s participation in the massive but peaceful protests, the well-functioning democratic procedures, and the responsiveness of the National Assembly and the Constitutional Court in the impeachment process, they also cannot deny the fact that the contemporary presidential system has its defects.
On a fundamental level, what makes former President Park’s corruption and influence peddling[1] possible? Broadly speaking, there are two competing views: an imperial presidency[2] vs a fragile presidency. Those who think of an imperial presidency as a key feature of Korean politics argue that the development of democracy in Korea has been delayed by the strong power concentrated in the presidency and the lack of institutions to check that power (Park, 2005; Jin, 2004; Moon, 2016). In contrast, others concentrate on the repeated pattern in which Korean presidents, despite great public support in the early periods of their terms, then suffer from corruption scandals and became too impotent to implement their key policies in the latter half of their terms (Choi, 2012a, b; Im, 2004; Jaung, 2017). In their view, the fundamental problem of Korean politics is a fragile presidency, not an imperial one.
In this paper, we explore the concepts of imperial and fragile presidencies, focusing on the aspect of policymaking authority by the level of public support. The paper argues that these two seemingly competing descriptions of the Korean presidency are not actually contradictory. Rather, we believe that an imperial president and a fragile president are two sides of the same coin, resembling a Janus face. Without combining the two arguments, it is impossible to explain a seemingly paradoxical pattern in the Korean presidency: enjoying imperial power during the...