The Power of the Candlelight. Discursive and Political Opportunities and Social Movement Outcomes in South Korea

• In Event: 1545 - Media Influences on Social Movements

Abstract

Recent scholarship highlights the importance social movements for political processes, but it rarely examines how movements and counter-movements shape discursive opportunities and how these opportunities affect political contexts. We examine two important processes through which movements and counter-movements affect discursive opportunities and political opportunity structures. First, movements can change the political discourse in sympathetic media outlets; second, movements can affect sympathetic political parties’ perception of movements’ grievances. We employ text analyses of mass media and political party communications before and during the anti-corruption movement or the Candlelight Revolution in South Korea from late 2016 and early 2017. Our data comes from five newspapers, three political parties, and a social movement organization. Preliminary results suggests that the mass media revelation that the government was corrupted by a “shadowperson” triggered mass protests, which were socially amplified in the liberal media outlets and attenuated in conservative media. The media coverage of the protests appears to have created not only a favorable discursive opportunity but also a political opportunity, by aligning the liberal and the progressive parties with the movement.

Authors

• Ion Bogdan Vasi, University of Iowa

• Hyunsik Chun, University of Iowa