Suchergebnisse

The #MeToo movement has shaken Korea over the last two years (Hasunuma and Shin 2019). Prosecutor Seo Ji-hyun's public testimony in January 2018 charged a former Ministry of Justice official with sexual harassment and catalyzed the #MeToo movement. Hundreds of Korean women came forward and spoke up about being sexually abused by powerful men. Social media platforms were flooded with hashtags such as #WithYou to support the movement and to express solidarity with victims of sexual violence. Women have taken to the streets for months demanding government action to prevent and punish sexual violence.

AbstractThis article examines a Japanese local party,Netto, as a new type of women's party. TheNettois defined as a "proactive women's party" to illustrate how it is different not only from conventional political parties but also from parties organized to promote feminist platforms. The JapaneseNettois a women-dominated party in which women constitute the majority of members and candidates, as well as party leadership. The party platform prioritizes practical women's interests such as safe food and child-rearing over women's labor or feminist issues. The gendered characteristics ofNettoappeal to middle-class housewives and mothers, facilitating the electoral success of the party in urban areas. The party's notable features, such as rotation of deputies, term limits, donation of deputy salary, and volunteerism, distinguishNettofrom conventional political parties. As such, the party provides an alternative model of political representation. TheNettoparty illustrates that not all women's parties use a feminist platform, but they still play an important role in changing male-dominated electoral politics.

This article explores the indirect impact of gender quota legislation on the election of women to the South Korean national parliament. Although quotas mainly apply to the proportional representation portion of the mixed electoral system, pressures on parties to comply with quotas for single-member districts has brought about a 'spillover effect', whereby women elected via proportional representation quotas are later nominated and re-elected to single-member district seats for which parties do not apply quotas. This effect stems from a 'no re-election' norm in the proportional representation system that emerged after electoral reform in the 2000s, combined with the fact that being elected through quotas enhances women's political experience and thus their chances to run for district seats. While the 'no re-election' norm initially exerts a negative impact by preventing women from winning the same seat at the next election, it has a positive prolonged impact on women's sustainable representation by relocating women incumbents to district seats while also continuing to elect women via quotas.

South Korea is one of the few East Asian countries in which candidate gender quotas are legislated for all levels of government. However, the implementation of quotas has been only partially successful as political parties do not comply with quota laws in the majoritarian tier of the country's mixed-member electoral system. To explain this non-compliance, this article examines how Korea's party organizations and candidate selection practices have subverted quota implementation. More specifically, we employ Rahat and Hazan's framework that disaggregates candidate selection processes into four areas-the selectorate, candidacy, centralization, and voting vs. appointment-and examine how two major Korean parties have chosen their candidates in the last three elections. By doing so, we demonstrate that in Korea's under-institutionalized parties, where party organizations have been overshadowed by individual personalities, implementation of quotas can easily be subordinated to the clientelistic incentives of party leaders. While the parties' centralized and exclusionary candidate selection procedures give party leaders a great deal of latitude to implement quotas, a better gender balance in the set of candidates is rarely a top priority for leaders in parties where personalism prevails. We argue that this explains why the quotas in Korea have been ineffective. (Pac Aff/GIGA)

This article analyzes the conditions under which gender-targeted public financing can improve gender equality in politics by taking South Korea as an example. The South Korean laws require that 10% of state funds for parties be spent on women's leadership training. Additional financial subsidies are granted to qualifying parties for subsidizing the campaign of female candidates. Our analysis indicates, however, that the outcome is mixed. Parties' practices of candidate nomination which have privileged male politicians have not changed. Instead, a large portion of the single-member district seats and public funding regime has facilitated large parties to monopolize additional public funding. This article suggests that the institutional design of public finance, without taking into consideration broader institutional frameworks, could end up reinforcing existing inequality.

In this Special Section, this article reviews South Korean views on Japan's 'peace' Constitution and the Abe government's attempts at constitutional reform. It identifies three different understandings among South Korean academics on why Japan is escalating attempts to revise the Constitution under the Abe government. An in-depth analysis demonstrates that all three perspectives pay specific attention to Japan's constitutional reform in relation to security policy changes. However, they differ in assessing the impact of Japan's constitutional reform on South Korea as well as how South Korea should deal with such a change. A minority opinion considers Japan's 'remilitarisation' through constitutional revision as conducive to South Korean security interests by increasing deterrence against North Korea, whereas the dominant opinion is that any attempt to revise the Constitution could be in and of itself a potential threat to South Korea's security due to a lack of trust attributed to unresolved historical conflicts between Korea and Japan. However, all three approaches pay hardly any attention to the positive role of Japan's peace Constitution while Japan's peace Constitution might provide a regional peace model in Northeast Asia. (Pac Rev/GIGA)

AbstractWomen's parties have a unique and important role to play in the representation of women and women's issues and interests. They are neither a new nor a rare phenomenon and have emerged in a variety of contexts across time and space. And yet we know relatively little about them. This article argues that women's parties matter and that the study of women's parties matters. We contend that women's parties constitute a discrete party family; while there is a diverse range of women's parties, they can be viewed as a coherent group with similar origins, ideology, and naming patterns. This article offers the first research framework for the comparative study of women's parties. Building our knowledge of women's parties, we argue, is important for those interested in gender and politics, particularly those concerned with the representation of women's issues and interests.