2. Policy Ideas and Interest Alignment in the Process of Institutional Change in Chaebol Reform

Reform is multi-faceted. Looking back on the history of South Korea’s political economy, South Korean society has displayed diverse patterns of economic reform in terms of goals, contents, means, and processes. Winners and losers have different notions of reform based on what potential benefit they can get from institutional change. Different stakeholders and actors may assume and pursue different goals, interests, ideas, and patterns of reform throughout the whole process of institutional change. Only fact we can agree on is that all reforms, for better or worse, take the form of institutional change. How can we identify the mechanism or politics, which often remain vague and mysterious, of institutional change? To answer these puzzles, we need to elaborate on institutional analysis by tracing the detailed process and examining how related variables interact on a specific issue in a critical period. Decoding the mechanism of institutional change has been one of the main research tasks in neo-institutional political economy. Diverse paths of institutional change can reflects the nature of real politics that define the internal workings of state behavior.