Guest Post: Hyunjin Seo on her new book, Networked Collective Actions: The Making of an Impeachment

“The era of perpetual presidential impeachment is probably upon us.” So wrote a Washington Post reporter in August 2021 in response to U.S. Republican lawmakers’ calls for the impeachment of President Joe Biden over the handling of U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. In September 2021, a group of Republican lawmakers did indeed file articles of impeachment against Biden over the issues of Afghanistan withdrawal and a migrant surge at the U.S. border.

In democratic countries, demands for presidential impeachments by opposition parties or citizens tend to happen during major economic or diplomatic crises or over significant policy disagreements. However, actual impeachment of a president by a country’s legislative body is rare and removal of the president through an impeachment process is rarer still. That is because, in most cases, a successful presidential impeachment requires action from both the legislative and judicial bodies as well as broad citizen support for the move.

In my new book Networked Collection Actions: The Making of an Impeachment I untangle the network of interactions that resulted in the momentous impeachment and removal from office of South Korean President Park Geun-hye in 2017. I analyze how a broad public consensus that President Park “must go” was achieved despite South Korea’s polarized news media environment, low public trust in journalism and government, and wide distribution of conspiracy theories and false claims by extreme right-wing media outlets.

Complex issues demand comprehensive analytic approaches. This book is based on interviews with key players in the impeachment movement together with original analyses of news reports and social media posts. The empirical data analyses are informed by my unique agent-affordance framework for understanding the role of information ecosystems in social change. Combining this theoretical framework with empirical analysis provides a holistic perspective on information ecosystems in the network age.

In explaining a major political or social event, commentators tend to want to identify a single cause as being responsible for determining outcomes. In the case of Park Geun-hye, pundits and some scholars have variously declared citizens or news media as being determinative—some have termed the impeachment a “citizen revolution,” others have said the “media brought down President Park.” While citizens’ sustained protests and media revelations of Park’s corruption were of great significance in Park’s removal, an easy, one-dimensional account falls well short of explaining what happened.

Candlelight protest against Park Geun-hye in Seoul, 7 January 2017. Photo: Matthew Schwartz (CC BY 3.0)

Citizens’ massive and sustained candlelight vigils calling for Park’s impeachment put pressure on political and legal institutions to take steps needed to remove Park from the presidency. Citizen mobilization, however, was neither initiated nor maintained in a vacuum. Cognitive and affective responses—so important to motivating and sustaining that large-scale gatherings that ended up lasting twenty consecutive weeks—were activated by news organizations’ investigative reporting and then maintained through citizens’ online and offline interactions, which were afforded by both social media platforms and physical gatherings. Most of all, South Korea’s long history of citizen-led social change protests also offered historical affordances that enabled citizens to individually and collectively imagine what might be possible, were they to act.

Similarly, when commentators have focused only on news media in revealing the corruption scandal, they have missed the role of social media influencers and citizens in pushing the media for broader coverage of events. They did so by amplifying news reports and helping build the narrative that Park “must go.” Successful impeachment resulted from intricate interactions among different agents within, and sometimes, against the various types of affordances (technological, political and legal) that I theorize form a country’s information ecosystem.

As South Korea was taking steps to remove President Park in 2017, some in the United States suggested that they could learn from the South Korean example. At that time, there were growing calls for impeaching then President Donald Trump over his campaigns’ alleged involvement with Russia during the 2016 presidential election and what many saw as his obstruction of justice during investigation of these claims. That a presidential impeachment in one country might be directly applied to another country, of course, reflects an extremely simplistic view of what are deeply complex and often nationally specific processes. However, analyzing how South Korea achieved the broad consensus on Park’s impeachment in a polarized media environment—Park’s approval rating, which had once hit 60%, plummeted to 4% just before the impeachment—offers lessons for countries where democratic governance is under threat amid increased influence of fringe media, disinformation and misinformation.

On a personal note, this book project is in part a culmination of my experience of covering presidential affairs in South Korea, first as a political journalist and now as an academic doing research on collective action and digital communication technologies. I developed a keen interest in writing about citizen mobilizations around Park’s impeachment partly because I had covered the South Korean National Assembly’s impeachment of President Roh Moo-hyun in 2004 while I was a correspondent to the presidential Blue House. At that time, candlelight vigils were held in opposition to the National Assembly’s impeachment of Roh (who was once famously called the “world’s first internet president”) leading the Constitutional Court to eventually dismiss the impeachment charges.

As I complete this article, I am visiting South Korea to observe campaigns for the country’s 20th presidential election slated for March 9th, 2022. On a cold winter day in December 2021, Gwanghawmun Square in downtown Seoul—a modern agora frequently used for citizen protests and where sustained candlelight vigils calling for Park’s impeachment were held—is occupied by a group of conservative activists demanding impeachment of progressive President Moon Jae-in over his rapprochement policy with North Korea and his administration’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. “The era of perpetual presidential impeachment” may indeed be upon us. My book offers insights into how such important political events now depend so much on digital communication technologies. 

Networked Collective Actions: The Making of an Impeachment is published by Oxford University Press in the Oxford Studies in Digital Politics series.