Democratic backsliding as a driver of foreign policy volatility: insights from the 2015 and 2023 South Korea–Japan agreements

Autocratization and democratic backsliding raise pressing questions about how democratic resilience and fragility affect the stability and reliability of foreign policy in electoral democracies. This article examines that relationship in South Korea through a paired case study of the 2015 “Comfort Women” Agreement and the 2023 Forced Labor Agreement with Japan, both concluded under conservative administrations. Drawing on democratic resilience theory and the V-DEM accountability framework, it conceptualizes weak democratic constraint as the erosion of horizontal, vertical, and diagonal accountability under conditions of executive aggrandizement. The analysis shows how South Korea’s limited “onset resilience” and high democratic fragility enabled exclusive, informal diplomacy that systematically bypassed legislative, judicial, and societal checks, generating inconsistent and erratic foreign policy outcomes. By linking autocratization trajectories to international strategy, the study argues that the sustainability and reliability of international commitments are fundamentally linked to the robustness of domestic accountability. It thus highlights how democratic erosion engenders foreign policy volatility, posing broader risks for stable foreign relations while recursively exacerbating the underlying process of democratic erosion.