Political Participation in Liberated Korea: Mobilization and Revolt in the Kyŏngsang Provinces, 1945-1950

Political Participation in Liberated Korea: Mobilization and Revolt in the Kyöngsang Provinces, 1945-1950 BRUCE CUMINGS Iolitical participation is not an easy concept to define, because the meaning it connotes depends on one's definition of politics and the political. Is the act of voting a sort of political participation ? Of course it is, but is it a meaningful form of participation, and would not a determination of meaning resolve to one's understanding of the political? Is it participation when masses of peasants are trundled off to the polls under the watchful, and often coercive, ministrations of local police and government functionaries? Or does a peasant participate when he picks up an implement of his trade and beats a representative of central bureaucratic power over the head? Such are the questions that trouble the mind of the observer of South Korea in the late 1940s, years when nation-wide elections proceeded amidst elemental peasant violence against the organs of the state. Much of the recent literature in political science has tended to limit the concept of political participation to discrete acts such as voting, or to joining a group with the goal of influencing public policy. The focus has been on participation in more or less legitimated, democratic , Western systems; the presumption has been that the political system within which participation occurs is relatively stable and enduring, and that acceptance of basic rules of the game places certain outer limits on the behavior of participants. The analyst takes a reading of political participation by means of voting or survey data, but gen163 164Journal of Korean Studies erally does not probe the origins or causes of the behavior he finds, or suggest how it might change or be changed. This literature in turn has spawned a general critique that has suggested that studies of political participation (and pluralist theory in general) betray a conservative, system-supportive bias; that they assume that the manner in which pluralist, Western systems function is the normal mode and "a good thing"; that they fear broad, mass participation, and therefore seek to amend classical democratic theory to account for and justify the reality of massive nonparticipation (e.g., nonparticipation aids the stability of the system); that they avoid hard questions about why people do not participate; and so on. Although I am inclined to agree with this critique, I also feel that neither it nor the established literature on political participation has much to offer in analyzing participation in underdeveloped countries or, say, in the changing peasant society of Korea in the 1940s. The approach to participation needed is one that is not confined to voting in elections or joining an interest group, but one that includes "all those activities through which the individual consciously becomes involved in attempts to give a particular direction to the conduct of public affairs." In other words, political activity involves the Hobbesian notion of purpose and goal-direction; it involves choice; it is conscious . The notion of consciousness is particularly important because 1.Standard works would include Lester W. Milbrath, Political Participation (Chicago: Rand McNaIIy, 1965); Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, 7"Ae Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1963, 1965); Robert Lane, Political Life (Glencoe, 111.: The Free Press, 1959); Sidney Verba, Norman H. Nie, and Jae-on Kim, "The Modes of Democratic Participation: A Cross-National Comparison," in Comparative Politics Series Two, ed. Harry Eckstein and Ted Robert Gurr (Beverly Hills, Calif., Sage Publications , 1971). 2.Some sources where this critique may be found include Henry Kariel, 7"Ae Decline of Pluralism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961), esp. chap. 9; Peter Bachrach, The Theory of Democratic Elitism (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1967); various articles in Apolitical Politics: A Critique of Behavioralism, ed. Charles A. McCoy and John Playford (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1967), and in Power and Community: Dissenting Essays in Political Science, ed. Philip Green and Sanford Levinson (New York: Vintage Books, 1970); Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970); Terrence E. Cook and Patrick M. Morgan, Participatory Democracy (San Francisco: Canfield Press, 1971); and Geraint Parry, ed., Participation in Politics (Manchester, England: Manchester...