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Fostering Trust in Government During a Pandemic: The Case of South Korea

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Nathan Park
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Abstract

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With mass-scale testing and extensive contact-tracing, South Korea's response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been among the strongest in the world. This success has often been credited to the Korean public's cultural willingness to trust their government and put up with measures that supposedly infringed on their liberties and privacy. While the trust has indeed been important, the reductive attempts to locate the source of the people's trust in Korea's Confucian heritage, homogeneous society, or deferential culture are misplaced. Contrary to the orientalist caricature, South Korea's political culture is marked by low trust in government and deep polarization along ideological lines, making it an obstacle to be overcome rather than a foundation for success. This paper will analyze the measures taken by the Moon Jae-in administration to manage the fractious politics surrounding the outbreak and foster the public trust in the government's response, and also explore the limits of such measures.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 18 , Issue 14 , July 2020 , e10
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2020

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