Conceptualizing the Left-Right Spectrum in Young Democracy with Text Data: The Case of South Korea

In many young democracies including Latin America and East Asia, key institutions such as party politics are weakly developed from the viewpoint of institutional and comparative frameworks. Their characteristics may be context-specific but lead to common outcomes such as party breakdowns and high political polarization, suggesting that typical weaknesses erode the nominal functions of institutions. This paper leverages the latency of political concepts that are universal across democracies due to the diffusion of the democratic model, which however experience conceptual shifts by importation. In order to scale “Left” to “Right” with contextual validity, I use local text sources that reflect the domestic perspective and apply text analysis to control for changes over time. In the case of South Korea, the concepts “progressive” and “conservative” are attributed to two polarized political camps since democratization in 1987. The text analysis of discourses in both camps compares the scale of Left/Right against progressive/conservative under the effect of time and other factors. Results show that universal concepts such as “progressive” and “conservative” are highly controversial and subject to political interpretation. This finding suggests that comparative institutions are in fact behaviors that are influenced by institutions, which sheds light on polarization, cleavages, and policy positions in young democracies.