Page 171 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

156 Chapter 8

With each new development, outrage broadened, moving from an initial focus on
influence peddling in the executive to anger at a larger system of patronage that left
many feeling shut out, with few ways to advance. The national protests grew from
calls for the president’s removal to wider demands for structural change, producing a
potentially important break from the past. Instead of focusing solely on the president,
investigations culminated in the unprecedented arrest of Samsung’s de facto leader,
Lee Jae-yong, in February on charges of paying $36 million to the shaman adviser.
“What we need is a great national cleanup,” said Moon Jae-in, the opposition leader
who succeeded Park as president in the May 2017 elections. “We must sternly punish
politics-business collusion, a legacy of the dictatorial era, and take this as an opportu-
nity to reform chaebol.”
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Democratic Consolidation in Global Context
The cases from Indonesia, Mexico, Tunisia, and South Korea share a com-
monality relevant to the core problem of this study: democratization’s inherent
inclination toward reversal. Each country’s transition seems chronically precari-
ous, poised to slide back to authoritarianism or sink into a permanent state of
pseudodemocracy. In each case, a nexus of collusion that facilitated corruption and
protected leaders from accountability became a major factor slowing democratic
consolidation. Each new spiral into deeper corruption and collusion, each layer
of insulation protecting entrenched interests, further weakened the mechanisms
of accountability and reduced opportunities to eff ect circulation of leadership. In
three of these countries—Indonesia, Mexico, and South Korea—the danger posed
by these trends was less reversion to authoritarianism than a potential slide into
pseudodemocracy. At diff erent moments, however, all four faced a risk of state
capture by antidemocratic forces that threatened a point of no return—rising
Islamists in Tunisia, moneyed drug cartels in Mexico, a budding autocrat in South
Korea, and an aspiring strongman in Indonesia.
In all these countries, however, civic-minded actors—journalists, students, watch-
dog organizations, and human rights groups—made sustained attempts to impose
accountability. The resulting revelations increased public awareness that corruption
and malfeasance remained at untenable levels, despite democratization’s promises of
reform. Such awareness by itself was not necessarily progress. For years, media schol-
ars have debated over the potential effect of “scandal fatigue,” or “politics fatigue,” on
democratic publics. In their 2004 global survey of political scandal, Howard Tumber
and Silvio Waisbord argue, as noted above, that “democracies are inherently prone to
be regularly shaken by scandals,” and the media, particularly in mature democracies,
have “short-lived attention” that “makes scandals prone to have a brief existence,”
inducing a “a numb public opinion” and little substantive change. The concern that
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too much news of scandal will alienate people from the political process and promote
apathy calls into question this study’s underlying premise that watchdog reporting is
good for democracy.
However, findings from closer examination of this phenomenon, sometimes
referred to as “media malaise,” suggest that greater consumption of news in general,
including negative stories, may foster increased civic engagement. Waisbord describes
a fatigue reaction to heavy political scandal reporting in Latin American countries but
also notes that public engagement tends to increase when scandals expose offenses
directly affecting ordinary citizens. In her own study testing the media malaise
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