Impeaching the Queen, Korean Style

By Won-ho Park

Won-ho Park is Associate Professor of Political Science at Seoul National University and is Vice President of the Korean Association of Party Studies.  He graduated from the University of Michigan with a Ph.D. in political science and previously taught at the Department of Political Science at the University Florida.  He also worked as a Fellow at the American National Election Studies. His research interest is in voting behavior, research methods, and Korean politics.

South Korea’s National Assembly voted to impeach President Park Geun-hye Dec. 9.  Since then, Park has been suspended from power and the nation is waiting on a Constitutional Court ruling finalizing the impeachment process, to reinstate or permanently remove Park from office. 

Among other things, perhaps what troubles South Koreans most is the drastic uncertainty ahead.  Most importantly, it is hard to predict how the Constitutional Court would rule on the case.  It may be that there is a fair chance the court will rule against the impeachment, since the court’s ideological make-up of the Court became quite conservative (with three recent appointments of the justices by Park herself) and given that impeachment requires a supermajority of six or more of the nine justices.

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