Omission and Distortion between the Street and Parliament: Discursive Gatekeeping During South Korea’s Martial Law Crisis

• In Event: Democratic Backsliding and the Erosion of Human Rights (Co-sponsored by Political Sociology Section)

Abstract

How does representative democracy translate citizens' multilayered suffering into the language of real-world politics? What is lost in that translation? This study introduces the concept of discursive gatekeeping to capture the mechanisms through which diverse languages of suffering articulated in civil society are selectively filtered and semantically transformed upon entering institutional politics. Analyzing the impeachment crisis surrounding South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol (December 2024–March 2025), we constructed two corpora: 441 protest speeches from two coalition groups leading impeachment rallies and approximately 43,500 National Assembly statements from the same period. Three computational methods were combined: structural topic modeling (STM), semantic projection using sentence embeddings (SBERT), and vector autoregression (VAR) with Granger causality tests. The analysis identifies two interconnected mechanisms. First, omission: intersectional language addressing labor, gender, disability, and sexual minorities, constituting roughly one-fifth of protest discourse, shows no significant temporal linkage with National Assembly discourse across all parties and lag structures. Second, distortion: sovereignty-related language (‘the people,’ ‘democracy,’ ‘constitution’) does pass through temporally (Granger causality F = 15.95, p < .001 at lag 2) but undergoes systematic semantic displacement, shifting from contexts of concrete resistance toward abstract institutional rhetoric. Party-level analyses reveal that this asymmetric filtration operates across all political positions, suggesting it is a structural property of the institutional field rather than an ideological choice. These findings extend existing scholarship on frame moderation, Bourdieu's linguistic markets, and Laclau's empty signifier by demonstrating that omission and distortion form a mutually reinforcing cyclical structure: distortion operates upon the semantic void created by omission, while omission enables the emptying that distortion requires. Discursive gatekeeping thus reveals how universalist political discourse can render the suffering of already-marginalized groups invisible precisely through the act of democratic representation.

Authors

• Seonwoo Ahn, Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology

• June Jeon, KAIST