The Territorial Politics of Regulation under State Capitalism: Regional Parties and the Politics of Local Economic Development in South Korea

This paper examines the relations between the conditions for, and the diverse forms of, local development politics. It does this by addressing a specific form of local development politics encountered in South Korea: a politics of regionalism. This is conceptualised in two stages. At an abstract level, the paper theorises the politics of local economic development in terms of the territorialisation of regulatory processes. On this basis, conceptual links are provided between the conditions for, and the forms of, local development politics by focusing on how the nature of party politics can influence the ways in which the politics of regulation is territorially constructed. Empirically, this paper explores the social and institutional conditions that have facilitated the penetration of regionalist party politics into the politics of local economic development in South Korea. More specifically, it examines the political processes, through which: local economic development initiatives, organised by local actors in Daegu (a central city in south-eastern Korea), brought about tensions with local actors in Busan (another big city in the south-east) around central government policies; and, the interlocal tension between Daegu and Busan became intertwined with a territorialised party politics and conditioned the rise of political regionalism in Daegu in the mid 1990s.