Sunkyoung Park

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Incheon National University

This study explores how authoritarian distributive policies may not only generate political support for the autocrat but may also help sustain powerful and lasting authoritarian legacies. We use microlevel data from South Korea's New Village Movement, a 1970s rural development program implemented under dictator Park Chung‐hee and widely touted as c...

Many democracies start with aspirations to rectify wrongs that occurred under the preceding authoritarian regime. To what extent can a new democracy address political repression and violence by dictators, given that key actors from the past often remain politically powerful? What determines the success of those efforts? We construct and analyze a n...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the paradoxical pattern in which South Korean presidents enjoy imperial power early in their term, but became fragile and impotent as their term comes to an end. Design/methodology/approach Based on the previous literature on Korean presidentialism, this paper introduces and critically compares...

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom that preferences over redistribution are a function of accurate knowledge regarding one's own relative economic status and that redistribution policies are based on those well-informed preferences. I argue that people often evaluate their relative economic status incorrectly and that this misperception...

This article explores the link between industrial policy and electoral outcomes under dictatorship. Using a difference-in-differences analysis of county-level panel data from 1971–88 in South Korea, it examines whether the industrial policy implemented by an authoritarian government affects constituents’ electoral decisions. It finds that counties...