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In recent years there has been a marked resurgence of interest in the effects of electoral laws on important aspects of politics such as party competition. In this volume, a distinguished group of scholars looks at the impact of one set of electoral rules--the single non-transferable vote--on electoral competition in Japan, Korea and Taiwan. Under this plan citizens are allowed one vote even though there is more than one seat to be filled. In comparative studies of the adoption and rejection of the single nontransferable vote and the consequences of its use across different settings, the contributors explore the differences in the operation and effects of the application of the same rule in different countries. Arguing that any single feature of a political system is embedded in a political structure and cannot be understood in isolation, the authors demonstrate how the same rule can have different consequences depending on the context in which it operates. The contributors offer fresh insights into the comparative study of political institutions as well as into the operation of particular electoral rules.

In addition to the editors, the contributors include Kathleen Bawn, John Boland, Jean-Marie Bouissou, Gary Cox, John Fu-Sheng Hsieh, Arend Lijphart, Emerson Niou, Steven R. Reed, and Frances Rosenbluth, among others.

Bernard Grofman is Professor of Political Science, University of California at Irvine. Edwin A. Winckler is at the East Asian Institute, Columbia University. Brian Woodall is Assistant Professor in the School of International Affairs, Georgia Institute of Technology. Sung-Chull Lee is Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of California at Irvine.

The Korean War has been called the “forgotten war,” not as studied as World War II or Vietnam. Choi examines the collective memory of the Korean War through five discrete memory sites in the United States and South Korea, including the PBS documentary Battle for Korea, the Korean War Memorial in Salt Lake City, and the statue of General Douglas MacArthur in Incheon, South Korea. She contends that these sites are not static; rather, they are active places where countermemories of the war clash with the official state-sanctioned remembrance. Through lively and compelling analysis of these memory sites, which include two differing accounts of the No Gun Ri massacre\--contemporaneous journalism and oral histories by survivors\--Choi shows diverse narratives of the Korean War competing for dominance in acts of remembering. Embattled Memories is an important interdisciplinary work in two fields, memory studies and public history, from an understudied perspective, that of witnesses to the Korean War.

Entrepreneurial Seoulite might be read as a memoir on Hongdae based on the author’s observations as a member of South Korea’s Generation X. During the 1990’s, Hongdae became widely known as a cool place associated with discourses on alternative music, independent labels, and club culture. Today, Hongdae is well known for its youth culture and nightlife, as well as its gentrification. 

Recent research on Korean culture approaches the K-wave phenomenon from the perspectives of cultural consumption, media analysis, and cultural management and policy. Meanwhile, studies on Seoul have centered on its transformation as a global, creative city. Rather than examining the K-wave or the city itself, this book explores the experience of living through the city-in-transition, focusing on the relationship between “the ideology that justified engagement in capitalism” and the “subjectification process.” The book aims to understand the project to institutionalize a cultural district in Hongdae as a demonstration of the coevolution of ideologies and citizenship in a society undergoing rapid liberalization—politically, culturally, and economically. 

A cultural turn took place in Korea during the 1990s, amid the economic prosperity driven by state-led industrialization and the collapse of the military dictatorship due to democratization movements. Cultural critiques, emerging as an alternative to social movements, proliferated to assert the freedom and autonomy of individuals against regulatory systems and institutions. The nation was hit by the Asian financial crisis in 1997, and witnessed massive economic restructuring including layoffs, stakeouts, and a prevalence of contingent employment. As a result, the entire nation had to find new engines of economic growth while experiencing a creative destruction. At the center of this national transformation, Seoul has sought to recreate itself from a mega city to a global city, equipped with cutting-edge knowledge industries and infrastructures.

By juxtaposing the cultural turn and cultural/creative city-making, Entrepreneurial Seoulite interrogates the formation of new citizen subjectivity, namely the enterprising self, in post-Fordist Seoul. What kinds of logic guide individuals in the engagement of new urban realities in rapidly liberalized Seoul—culturally and economically? In order to explore this query, Mihye Cho draws on Weber’s concept of “the spirit of capitalism” on the formation of a new economic agency focusing on the re-configuration of meanings, and seeks to capture a transformative moment detailing when and how capitalism requests a different spirit and lifestyle of its participants. Likewise, this book approaches the enterprising self as the new spirit of post-Fordist Seoul and explores the ways in which people in Seoul internalize and negotiate this new enterprising self.