Koreans and Americans were compared in terms of political ideology and moral attitudes. The pattern found among U.S. participants is that liberals rated moral concerns about harm and unfairness higher than Korean conservatives, but conservatives rated moral concerns about betrayals of the ingroup and violations of social hierarchies and physical/spiritual purity higher. Compared with U.S. data (in which concerns about purity and disgust showed the strongest relation to ideology), Korean data revealed higher purity concerns overall, and a weaker relationship between purity concerns and ideology. Results suggested that while the patterns of ideological difference in moral concerns are the same, the magnitude of the differences depends upon the particular histories, traditions, and socioecological factors of these different cultures. They also emphasize a consistent pattern of overall moral structure: liberals discounted concerns related to group cohesiveness (rating them at best "slightly relevant") and rated only individualistic concerns as "somewhat" to "very" relevant, while conservatives rated all moral concerns in the latter range, nearly equating individual and group moral concerns.

This study intends to examine the environments and the characteristics of political participation of teenage political participation. The 2008 Candlelight Protests of Korea is used as the case of this study. Traditionally, teenagers in Korea have been known to disengage from political affairs because they are usually worn by intense academic challenge and competition. In that sense, participation of teenagers at such a large scale shown in the 2008 Candlelight Protests of Korea can only be explained as a huge shift in political preference of teenagers and conventional social norms. In that sense, the case of 2008 Candlelight Protests of Korea has shown great implications for the political potential of new media, which is capable of revolutionizing the political socialization patterns of youth. Survey results demonstrated that the Internet had become an important tool from which the teenagers collected political information and channels which they used to organize and mobilize. Numbers also showed that the degree of the youth’s sociopolitical interests were higher than the adult’s. Another notable fact found was that female students showed more aggressive involvement than male students and this could be explained by the difference in the Internet usage pattern between male and female students. In using media, adolescent girls displayed more relationship and objective-oriented behaviors than the boys.

Previous studies have shown that social media is effective in large-scale mobilization, facilitating leaderless and more flexible forms of resistance. However, some scholars argue that this type of mobilization suffers from a lack of organizational form and collective identity. This paper shows that social media-centered networks can in fact promote collective actions powerful enough to challenge a corrupt president. We also prove the role of emotions in collective actions. Using an empirical analysis of the 2016 Presidential Impeachment Protests surrounding “Choi Soon-sil Gate,” we first demonstrate the effects of social media activities on participation in collective actions. Next, we explore the effects of anger on social media activities and participation. In short, this study reveals a new angle on social media’s influence in mobilizing collective actions by analyzing the effect of emotions on participation. In this process, social media activities are escalated by emotional outbreaks, and participation then increases throughout a given collective action.

Many previous studies have proven that social media is more likely to promote selective exposure in the acquisition of political information and to escalate political polarization than is older media. However, this study argues that the impact of social media on selective exposure and political polarization occurs differently according to the characteristics of their platforms. To prove this argument, we firstly compared old and social media in terms of their impact on selective exposure. Secondly, we compared the two different types of social media, Facebook and KakaoTalk, to examine their influences on selective exposure and the political polarization of public opinion during the presidential impeachment in South Korea. As a result, we observed that people using social media were more selective in choosing news sources than those using television. We also found that users of KakaoTalk were more selective in acquiring political information on the presidential impeachment than were Facebook users, and the same consequences appeared in political polarization. Therefore, we determined that the political and social influence of social media varies according to its platform characteristics.

Armed Forces and Society recently published an article, “Intra-Military Division and Democratization in South Korea” by Insoo Kim. In the article, Kim argues that economic development and civil society explanations for South Korea’s democratization are not sufficient because conflict in the military undermined the ability of Chun’s government to suppress the democracy movement, which made the transition possible. We refute Kim’s argument because economic development clearly made significant contribution to South Korea’s democratization by enhancing education attainment and facilitating industrialization and urbanization. Moreover, there is no clear evidence of schism in the military or among political elites, and the authoritarian leader Chun Doo-hwan agreed to change the presidential election system based on his political calculation.