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This article analyzes the factors that caused recent conflicts between the Korean government and civil society over e-government initiatives and draws implications for e-governance. The disputes over the government's digitalization initiatives in Korea, for example the conflicts over the electronic education system and the national electronic ID card, show that the government in Korea as in other countries has faced fierce opposition from citizens and suffered major setbacks in pursuing its ICT projects. This article argues that the current cases in Korean society should be understood from a new perspective, one which emphasizes the interaction between the technical standard and the social standard. It shows that the gaps between technical standards, which idealize efficiency, and social standards, which weigh e-privacy as supreme, breed conflict. Finally, the research draws some implications of the analysis for e-governance and democracy.

This study performs opinion mining of newspaper articles, based on topics extracted by topic modeling. We analyze the attitudes of the news media towards a major issue of 'presidential election', assuming that newspaper partisanship is a kind of opinion. We first extract topics from a large collection of newspaper texts, and examine how the topics are distributed over the entire dataset. The structure and content of each topic are then investigated by means of network analysis. Finally we track down the chronological distribution of the topics in each of the newspapers through time serial analysis. The result reveals that both the liberal newspapers and the conservative newspapers exhibit their own tendency to report in line with their adopted ideology. This confirms that we can count on opinion mining technique based on topics in order to analyze opinion in a reliable fashion.

This study analyzes Korea's often noted yet seldom studied spectacular rise to become one of the important global players in the mobile telecommunications industry. The Korean "leap frog" occurred in the context of liberalization under the worldwide liberal telecommunications regime. This article finds that network governance-the emphasis on the use of partnerships and network transactions with global firms as well as the local private sector-is the reason for Korea's success. It examines the origins of and driving forces acting upon the liberalization policy, and discusses how the state and telecom firms cooperated to develop the mobile market. It also assesses the new governance that is taking place in Korea's telecom market by focusing on the changing roles of the state in three major aspects: provision, regulation, and foreign entry barriers into the mobile market. While the Korean government promoted a market-conforming telecom market and private ownership, this article argues, it formulated rather different governance principles from the U.S. model of liberal governance.