In July 2023, South Korea was hit by severe monsoon rains. The Marine Corps was dispatched to Yecheon for rescue operations. Corporal Chae Su-geun, a 20-year-old marine, and his team were ordered to enter fast-moving floodwaters without life vests or safety equipment. Chae was swept away and found dead hours later.
At first, it seemed like a tragic accident caused by heavy rain. But as the investigation deepened, it became clear that the real problem was how orders were given and obeyed. Commanders valued discipline more than safety, and no one dared to question the risky order. What failed that day was not just a rescue plan but a system where following orders mattered more than protecting lives.
Public outrage followed immediately. Citizens demanded accountability, opposition lawmakers proposed a special prosecutor bill, and the Marine Corps opened an internal inquiry. On paper, these responses showed that democracy was working. Leaders spoke, institutions acted, and procedures unfolded.
Yet, none of these steps reached the people who had given the fatal orders. Each action remained procedural, focused on managing outrage rather than uncovering truth. This is why they only looked democratic. Scholars such as Baron, Blair, Gottlieb, and Paler, call such patterns incremental backsliding, a process where institutions keep functioning, but their actions slowly shift from protecting citizens to protecting power.
How Procedures Became a Shield for Power
The investigation initially named eight officers—including Major General Lim Seong-geun—responsible for safety failures. Yet, within twenty-four hours, Defense Minister Lee Jong-sup withdrew the report for further review. A revised version erased all senior officers’ names and criminal charges, leaving only two lieutenant colonels, who were mid-level officers without decision-making authority. The machinery of justice kept moving, but its direction changed. Its purpose shifted from discovering responsibility to protecting hierarchy.
1. Erosion of Vertical Accountability
Major General Lim filed defamation suits against soldiers and journalists who questioned his role in the unsafe rescue decisions that led to Chae’s death. The defamation suits could be framed as an exercise of personal rights, yet their political effect was far greater. They signaled that questioning senior officers could trigger legal consequences, effectively turning criticism into risk. When the cost of speaking rises within the law, citizens and reporters self-censor, not because they are not allowed to speak, but because they fear litigation. This marks a loss in two dimensions of democracy, participation and accountability.
At the same time, Colonel Park Jung-hoon, who led the investigation, was later indicted for insubordination. Officially, he was accused of violating the chain of command by submitting an unapproved report to the police three times after it had been ordered withdrawn. According to his own testimony, he did so because every revision demanded him to delete the names of senior officers, including General Lim. In this context, legality became a language of discipline. What was presented as “procedural correction” functioned as a warning to anyone who resisted revision.
As a result, public criticism remains visible, even accessible, yet dangerous to exercise. Any statement that questions the chain of command now carries risk like defamation charges, disciplinary warnings, or career setbacks. Thus creating a legalized silence in public life that is not imposed by overt censorship, but produced by institutions themselves, the procedural form of vertical decay.
2. Weakening of Horizontal Accountability
The opposition’s special prosecutor bill sought to let the National Assembly and judiciary investigate potential interference by the presidential office. President Yoon vetoed the bill twice, citing procedural flaws and asserting that police investigations sufficed. He was constitutionally correct, but, substantively, oversight became nearly impossible. Waldner & Lust remind us that democracy declines not when rules break, but when rule-following itself disables scrutiny.
This pattern shows how legality itself becomes a tactic of delay. Each veto follows proper procedure, yet together they push accountability further away from the authority. The outcome is not the disappearance of the law, but the disappearance of anyone who can use it. The procedure remains intact, yet its ability to check power quietly erodes.
Beyond the Incident: Legality as the New Architecture of Control
During Colonel Park’s trial, a Defense Ministry aide testified that she had suggested removing senior officers’ names, “not as pressure, but as one option”. Park understood what it meant. Those who resisted would face the risk of poor performance reviews, delayed promotions, or quiet reassignment. The warning was clear without words. This aligns with Bessen’s observation that modern authoritarianism often relies not on repression but on predictable cues of disapproval that train obedience within legal bounds. Those who resist face stalled careers rather than overt punishment.
Each time new evidence surfaced, the government repeated that the investigation was still ongoing. The longer the process continued, the easier it became to claim that accountability was already being handled. Procedure no longer served justice, it became the substitute of justice.
Citizens were reassured that democracy was functioning because everything appeared lawful. Yet, as Schmitter and Karl observed, the value of democracy lies not in procedure itself but in the capacity to hold power responsible. When procedures are mobilized to defend authority rather than correct wrongdoing, democracy’s core function collapses. Power no longer needs to abolish democracy, it only needs to make it look as if democracy is still working.
Through repeated investigations, hearings, and statements, public outrage is absorbed and domesticated. Democracy continues to operate, but what it protects is no longer the public’s right to know, rather, it is the stability of power itself.
Conclusion: When Democracy Operates in Reverse
By standard definitions, democratic backsliding is incremental, legal-form, and involves deterioration in at least two dimensions of participation and accountability. In Chae’s case, the constitution stood, elections continued, and procedures were observed. Yet participation narrowed through legalized silence, and accountability weakened through procedural vetoes. The tragedy of Corporal Chae exposes a democracy that functions perfectly while reversing its purpose. South Korea’s democracy is quietly becoming a system where procedures endure, but justice retreats behind their form.
References
Baron, Hannah, Robert A. Blair, Jessica Gottlieb, and Laura Paler. “An Events-Based Approach to Understanding Democratic Erosion.” PS: Political Science & Politics, 2023. https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/C480012CCF036A733DAD3A1766B2E2C0/S1049096523001026a.pdf/an-events-based-approach-to-understanding-democratic-erosion.pdf
Bessen, David. “Stealth Authoritarianism in the 21st Century.” Comparative Political Studies, 2024. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00104140231223738
Choe, Sang-Hun. “New Scandal Engulfs South Korean Leader in Wake of Marine’s Death.” The New York Times, May 30, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/30/world/asia/korea-marine-yoon-impeachment.html
The Korea Herald. “Marine Corps Officer Indicted over Death of Soldier in Flood Rescue Operation.” The Korea Herald, July 31, 2023. https://www.koreaherald.com/article/3172091
The Korea Herald. “Prosecutors Seek 3-Year Prison Term for Marine Corps Investigator over Chae’s Death.” The Korea Herald, November 21, 2024. https://www.koreaherald.com/article/3398337
Schmitter, Philippe C., and Terry Lynn Karl. “What Democracy Is… and Is Not.” Journal of Democracy, 2(3), 75–88, 1991. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/jod.1991.0033
Waldner, David, and Ellen Lust. “Unwelcome Change: Understanding, Evaluating, and Extending Theories of Democratic Backsliding.” Annual Review of Political Science, 21, 93–113, 2018. https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-polisci-050517-114628
One thing your post made me to notice is how the whole situation reflects on stealth authoritarianism, which is the kind of democratic erosion that hides behind legal procedures instead of openly violating them (Varol, 2015). In the Chae case, nothing really looks like a dramatic power grab. There’s no censorship, no dissolved legislature, no military crackdown. Yet everything is wrapped in the language of “procedure,” “review,” and “protocol.” But the outcome, shielding senior officers from responsibility, is exactly what stealth authoritarian practices are designed to achieve. It is the misuse of the democratic institutions put in place.
The part that is worrying is how this dynamic reshapes the social contract between citizens and the state. The public responded in the way that a strong and healthy democracy expected, they demanded the truth, pushed for further investigations, and refused to let the issue disappear. Yet the institutional response was basically procedural choreography, which, as you mention, had lots of movement, but no actual accountability. When institutions rely on being technically legal to deflect rather than resolve, it shows the citizens that formal participation still exists, but its impact is limited. That’s where stealth authoritarianism becomes genuinely dangerous. It ends up draining trust without triggering the alarms that are associated with overt repression.
And once their people internalize that nothing meaningful changes even under heavy public pressure, participation turns symbolic. Citizens keep speaking because they’re “supposed to,” while institutions perform responsiveness without ever confronting power. This creates a slow democratic decay that feels normal, even inevitable. In that sense, the Chae case isn’t just a tragedy or a bureaucratic failure. It’s a moment where the system quietly reveals how it can protect itself while looking perfectly democratic on the surface.
This is a really great analysis of how procedural compliance can mask democratic erosion, and how legal frameworks can be repurposed to protect those in positions of power over citizens by creating a fear of speaking out against corruption. Including erosion to both vertical and horizontal accountability is interesting as well, as in this case it underscores not only the importance of both for the protection of democratic institutions, but also how fragile they are when in certain circumstances. When horizontal accountability is weakened, elites are protecting themselves, like in this instance with President Yoon vetoing a bill to investigate interference, and while this by itself is corrupt, there remain some guardrails. However, when vertical accountability is concurrently weakened, those who call out corruption are silenced, like Colonel Park Jung-hoon, until none are left.
One angle that might be interesting to further explore is the role of civil society and media in responding to erosion at these levels. You mention how immediately following the operation there was public outrage and demands for accountability, but when investigated only those involved with the Marine Corps investigation had the ability to hold those responsible accountable, even when there is clear interference in the integrity of democratic institutions. There are more actors who are able to call out this behavior; Journalists, NGOs and citizen groups also serve as vertical accountability, albeit with less authority than those directly involved in the investigation. In South Korea, understanding whether these actors are also under threat of retaliation could identify either a deeper layer of democratic erosion, or a potential for resilience in a system where legal procedure has been weaponized to maintain hierarchy.
Often, when thinking about democratic backsliding, much of what comes to mind are examples and methods of obtaining executive aggrandizement. In this case, the democratic backsliding is present through the legal processes used to hold the military accountable and how the government protects its own authority. While the case of the Marine’s death stands out because of how it remained overlooked by the majority of the population, it is nevertheless a key indicator of institutions failing to bring justice to major issues and allows for future cases to be dismissed but appear addressed.