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parties hesitated and failed to pass the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye.

December 3 was the largest protest recorded in modern Korean history: 2.3 million
citizens nationwide, including 1.9 million in Seoul, took to the streets and demanded
the immediate impeachment and resignation of Park Geun-hye. Six months of
continuous candlelight rallies ended with Park’s dramatic downfall from president to

prisoner, after which a new government was elected and South Korean democracy
rebounded.

Because the candlelight protest stopped deconsolidation of South Korean
democracy and enabled its restoration, scholars started to praise both the

candlelight protest and South Korean democracy. For example, Hong-koo Lee
(2017), the former prime minister of Korea, praised “South Korea as a beacon of
Asian democracy” and Yascha Mounk (2018, 185) stated that the candlelight
protests “can serve as inspiration to defenders of liberal democracy around the

world.” Ha-Joon Chang (2017) described in The New York Times that “South
Koreans worked a democratic miracle.” Finally, after editing a special issue of Korea
Journal about the candlelight protest and South Korean democracy, HeeMin Kim
(2019, 15) concluded that “we are optimistic about the future of democracy in

Korea.”

Although these scholarly evaluations are insightful enough to provide
temporary information about the state of democracy in South Korea, they are

limited in assessing its consolidation and deconsolidation in a systematic way. The
reasons are twofold. Conceptually, these assessments of South Korean democracy
narrowly focus on institutional dimensions of democratic health and, thus, fail to
view democratic consolidation as multidimensional phenomena having both
institutional and cultural aspects. As Rose and his colleagues (1998, 8) aptly

pointed out, “if institutions are the ‘hardware of democracy, then what people think
about these institutions constitutes the ‘software’ of democracy.” Second, little is
known about whether the candlelight protest temporarily halted deconsolidation of

South Korean democracy or functioned as an important moment to deepen
democracy. Likewise, it is an imperative task to examine whether democratic
การอภิปราย restoration is a short moment and democratic deconsolidation is a persistent trend
in South Korea.