Time to design a Korean system of governance

Cho Yoon-je The author is a special appointment professor at the Graduate School of Economics at Yonsei University. There is a saying that for every complex question, there is almost always a simple, neat and plausible answer that is wrong. The idea of Korea's "imperial presidency" often strikes me as one such answer. Whenever constitutional reform is discussed, the same diagnosis appears: The concentration of presidential power is blamed for the failures of Korean politics, and power-sharing is presented as the solution. The history of Korea's presidents is indeed extraordinary. In one of the most successful postwar development stories in the world, it is difficult to find a president of the country who has not faced exile, assassination, imprisonment, impeachment, suicide or criminal investigation. But is this simply the result of excessive presidential power? If Korean presidents truly possessed such authority, why were they unable to use it effectively and legitimately? Why did so many leave office under public criticism or legal punishment? Novelist John Updike, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, once wrote in "The New Yorker" that the American presidency is merely a stop on the way to the blessed condition of becoming a former president. Even during U.S. President Donald Trump's first term, former President Barack Obama and his wife earned substantial income through speeches, books and consulting work while continuing to enjoy broad public respect. Former President Bill Clinton followed a similar path. Earlier American presidents also moved on to productive postpresidential lives. George Washington established a whiskey distillery, William Howard Taft became chief justice of the United States and Herbert Hoover pursued his passion for fishing. During my years working in Britain and the United States, I observed that prime ministers and presidents there exercised authority comparable to, and sometimes greater than, that of Korean presidents. The Republic of Korea was founded by rapidly adopting institutions that had evolved over centuries in Western democracies. This created a significant gap between formal institutions and social realities. Korea's first Constitution, modeled largely on that of the Weimar Republic, was drafted and adopted within little more than a month. For thousands of years, the Korean Peninsula had never experienced a system based on the separation of powers. Nor had it undergone the intellectual movements that shaped modern democratic institutions in the West. As a result, a disconnect emerged between legal institutions and social behavior. Korea's rapid economic rise was not achieved solely through strict adherence to formal rules. Much of its success came from bridging the gap between institutions and reality through informal practices. Viewed favorably, this was flexibility. Viewed critically, it often involved corruption or legal shortcuts. This pattern extended beyond government. The history of Korea's economic development is also a history of arrests and presidential pardons involving business leaders. Family-controlled conglomerates dominate the economy, yet Korean commercial law contains no formal definition of a chaebol. As conglomerates expanded, practices such as accounting manipulation, preferential transactions among affiliates, cross-support and lobbying became common. In such a structure, controlling shareholders could easily become entangled in allegations of breach of trust, tax evasion or embezzlement. The same reality affected ordinary citizens. Powerful investigative agencies emerged in a society where few individuals or companies could claim perfect compliance with every rule. Korean politics, society and the economy operated under that shadow for decades, and traces of it remain today. This is not an argument in defense of corruption or legal violations. Rather, it is a call to examine honestly the relationship between Korea's institutions and the behavior of its people. Th...