분열성 법치주의와 저품질의 왜소화(矮小化)된 민주주의 - ‘좋은 민주주의’의 관점에서 본 통합진보당 해산 결정의 문제

Abstract

This article evaluates the impacts from the Corean Constitutional Court’s ruling on the dissolution of Unified Progressive Party in Dec. 19th., 2014, from the standpoint of the quality of governance of Corean democratic polity, that is, the ‘quality of Corean democracy’. After I overview the tries of Corean political scientists to receive the problematics of the concept of ‘quality of democracy’, I reconstruct the conceptual factors of the democratic polity of which procedures, contents, and outcomes can be assessed qualitatively in the empirical ways following Prof. Leonardo Morlino’s initiating idea of ‘a good democracy’ which was inspired by the concept of quality of commodities current in industry and marketing. Because citizens are the decisive factor to carry out the evaluation of the quality of democracy, it turns out that the conceptual reconstruction of quality of democracy which Morlino has analyzed implies the civic-democratic conception of modern democracy with the citizen-state-partnership as its political ideal type in contrast with the classical model of modern democracy concentrating on constituting and implementing the governing authorities of power. With such theoretical backgrounds, the concept of quality of democracy turns out to be a kind of multi-factor one which consists of 1) rule of law and accountability on procedural dimension, 2) the normative values of freedom and equality, and 3) civic responsiveness as its outcome. If governance of a real democracy is evaluated as positive according to the synthetic consideration on the constituents of the concept, quality of democracy, then it is characterized as ‘quality democracy’ or ‘a good democracy’. Evaluating the moments, processes and outcomes of the Constitutional Court’s ruling on the dissolution of Unified Progressive Party, the factor of the rule of law presents itself as politically schizophrenic, the horizontal accountability was not respected, freedom was narrowly interpreted in an arbitrary usage of supra-national value of freedom, and the factor civic responsiveness does not show sufficient satisfaction of Corean citizens in confusion. When we substitute such analytical outcomes for the various patterns of quality of democracy, the Corean real democracy is classified as low- quality reduced democracy, being insufficient in rule of law (-), accountability (-), responsiveness(-) and freedom (-).