Nostalgia without Memory: Park Chung-hee Nostalgia and Its Political Consequences among Young Koreans

Co-sponsored with the Korea Institute

Why does an authoritarian past retain political appeal among people who never experienced it? Research on authoritarian nostalgia has largely emphasized political socialization under dictatorship and retrospective evaluations of democratic performance. These explanations become less satisfactory, however, as generations with firsthand experience of authoritarian rule give way to those raised under democracy. For younger citizens, favorable views of a dictatorship cannot be derived from personal memory. They instead depend on what later generations come to know, value, and associate with the authoritarian past.

South Korea offers a particularly revealing case. Young South Koreans did not experience Park Chung-hee’s rule, yet they have inherited sharply divided accounts of his presidency, associated both with political repression and rapid economic development. I use selective authoritarian memory reproduction to describe how particular elements of this legacy retain political significance among those with no firsthand experience of the regime. Development and repression leave different kinds of traces. As the population that experienced authoritarian rule declines, repression is increasingly encountered through education, historical accounts, and mediated representations. The economic transformation associated with the Park era, by contrast, remains embedded in narratives of national development and in the institutional and material consequences of industrialization. Which legacy becomes more salient also varies with contemporary economic concerns, security attitudes, and partisan and regional identities.

These different understandings of the past are associated with younger citizens’ views of democracy. Controlling for other relevant individual characteristics, survey evidence shows that young South Koreans who express nostalgia for Park Chung-hee are more likely to withhold support for democracy or to support alternative political models than those who do not. Admiration for Park does not, in itself, amount to a preference for dictatorship, but its association with weaker democratic commitment is particularly consequential amid South Korea’s recent political turmoil, including a presidential impeachment and removal, criminal prosecution and detention, and a subsequent snap presidential election. While such crises often draw attention to political elites and institutional conflict, the findings here bring into view the social foundations of democratic regression. The political life of an authoritarian legacy does not necessarily end when the generation that experienced it disappears. It can be renewed within democracy as later generations reinterpret what authoritarian rule represented and accomplished. Selective authoritarian memory reproduction captures this process and helps explain how an authoritarian past can regain political force from below.