earticle

영어

In terms of building of democratic institutions and democratic process in national agenda setting Korean democracy seems to have not reached democratic consolidation. Despite long process of struggle for democracy, Korea is still broadly suffering from fierce physical confrontations between ruling and opposition parties within the Korean Assembly, antagonism between the haves and the have-nots, regional and metropolitan divide, and lack of popular support in resource distribution and balanced regional development. Democracy in Scandinavia, however, seems to show a contrasting example: stable legal and institutional process based on reconciliation and consensus backup among social groups in agenda setting as well as distribution of national resources. The central hypothesis of this article says that both
quality and political outcome of democratic institutions are mainly dependent upon the positive and active role of consensus building mechanism. The failure or, at least, lack of open consensus building mechanism in a country may cause widespread national disharmony,
conflict and antagonism. From the Swedish case study of institutional and constitutional reform politics, this article argues that the successful case of Swedish democracy with high political and social quality is based on the role of consensus building in general and, on the role of
Special committee system including SOU and Remiss processes in particular. It is also argued that dysfunctions caused by power domination of incompetent political parties in representative democracies should be complemented by the deliberative way of decision-making process in which many actors are participating in order to cope with the political ineffectiveness in emerging democracies including South Korea.