Democratic Crisis and Reform

Research Focus

The Democratic Crisis and Reform research theme assesses the liberalized political evolution in Asian countries, identifies current challenges to democracy, and seeks future prospects for democratic longevity in the region.

This research is part of the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab (SNAPL).

Scroll down to learn about the projects in this research track.

Research Projects

Lee Jae-myung's Presidential Win and What's Ahead for Korean Democracy
 

Lee Jae-myung of the Democratic Party won South Korea’s June 3, 2025 presidential election with 49.4 percent of the vote – an outcome that both reflects the resilience of Korean democratic institutions and underscores the hurdles that lie ahead for Korean society and politics. In the Journal of Democracy, Professor Gi-Wook Shin weighs in on the election results and what's ahead for Korean democracy. Read his analysis.

In the months following Yong Suk Yeol's December 2024 attempted martial law, Shin provided his insights and commentary on Korea's political turmoil in national and international media. Explore his analysis via our news roundup and Shin's following blog and interviews.

December 2025 update: Although South Korea withstood the political storms that followed Yoon's martial law declaration, the events over the past year have “illustrated a fragile democracy divided against itself,” write Gi-Wook Shin and Kerstin Norris in an essay for The Diplomat.

[Trans]national Appropriation of Populist Movements: Trumpism and Right-Wing YouTube Discourse in South Korea (Kerstin Norris and Gi-Wook Shin)

This ongoing project examines how Trumpism has become a portable global populist repertoire and how its rhetorical tools are appropriated within South Korea’s right-wing YouTube network. Using a corpus of videos from major conservative channels spanning the 2024 National Assembly elections to the 2025 snap election, a period of heightened polarization, we show that Korean conservatives selectively draw from a transnational populist toolkit but re-signify its elements through domestic logics of securitization and national membership. Rather than replicating Trumpism, Korean actors recombine its slogans, conspiratorial frames, and moral narratives with longstanding national storylines about internal enemies, constitutional order, and contested belonging. Tracing these patterns of uptake and reworking across digital media, the project demonstrates how global right-wing populist repertoires circulate, mutate, and become nationalized in practice.
 

Tracing South Korea’s Gender War (Gi-Wook Shin and Irene Kyoung)
 

This project analyzes how South Korea’s democratic transition expanded formal rights while allowing core patriarchal structures to persist, producing a gender order that remains deeply contested in contemporary politics. Tracing developments from women’s workplace activism under authoritarian rule to post-1987 reforms and recent waves of feminist and antifeminist mobilization, we show that Korea’s democratization incorporated women as political actors while marginalizing feminist demands, resulting in persistent gaps in representation, economic opportunity, and care responsibilities. These structural inequalities form the backdrop to today’s intensifying “gender war,” in which antifeminist influencers and political parties strategically reframe equality measures as reverse discrimination and mobilize young male grievances for electoral gain. By mapping these dynamics across historical periods and political arenas, the project demonstrates how unresolved questions of gender justice circulate, mutate, and become central to Korea’s democratic contestation, revealing that democratization without gender equality remains an incomplete and unstable project.

Related Events and Publications

Sustainable Democracy Roundtable
 

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Liberal democracy is hard-earned but sometimes even harder to guard. The foundations of liberal democracy are being seriously challenged, leading to political decay and a decline in public trust in democratic systems and their values. With democratic backsliding threatening old and new democracies, Western democracies no longer serve as a guiding light.

Against this backdrop, the annual Sustainable Democracy Roundtable brings together scholars of diverse backgrounds to propose solutions to globally pertinent policy issues. In partnership with the Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies (KFAS), the Sustainable Democracy Roundtable offers a unique platform for scholars to present alternative solutions to global issues, social progress, and long-term development. Our goal is to spur research partnerships and produce publication deliverables with experts, scholars, and students from the United States and the Asia-Pacific region.

Explore the roundtable convenings and conference reports:
 

2025 KFAS-Stanford Sustainable Democracy Roundtable
Download the 2025 roundtable report >

2024 KFAS-Stanford Sustainable Democracy Roundtable
Download the 2024 roundtable report > 

2023 KFAS-Stanford Sustainable Democracy Roundtable
Download the 2023 roundtable report >

In the media

2025 roundtable coverage by Asian media outlets:
Yonhap I >
Yonhap II > 
The Fact via MSN >

2024 roundtable coverage:
Interview with Professors Gi-Wook Shin and Larry Diamond for Hankook Ilbo (in Korean) >