The local policy of the Lee Jae-myung administration is summarized as "5 Poles and 3 Specials" based on decentralization. Early last month, President Lee Jae-myung stated at the "National Report Meeting on the Development Vision for Advanced Industries in the Chungcheong Region," saying, "Each of the five poles and three special areas will build independent industrial ecosystems, compete with one another, and foster local-led growth." The five poles refer to the Seoul Capital Area, Southeast Region, Daegu-Gyeongbuk Region, Central Region, and Honam Region; the three specials refer to Jeju, Gangwon, and Jeollabuk-do as special self-governing provinces. This is a plan to restructure the single-pole system of the Seoul Capital Area into five poles and three specials to achieve balanced national development. In line with this direction, the Gwangju Integrated Special City in South Jeolla Province officially launched on July 1.
The vision of building super-regional megacities and enhancing regional competitiveness through economies of scale appears to follow the trend of the times. However, there is one question that this grand growth narrative overlooks: Can the expansion of administrative regions truly narrow the democratic distance between residents and administration?
Super-regionalization has the advantage of improving the efficiency of administration and finance. However, as a drawback, it creates a "democratic deficit" resulting from the growing physical and psychological distance between administrative bodies and residents. This concept, proposed by British political scientist David Marquand, points out that as administrative units become larger, residents feel powerless, believing their voices are not reflected in the massive administrative machinery. Ultimately, super-regionalization leads to a decline in political efficacy and indifference toward administration.
The bigger problem is that the vacuum created by resident indifference is filled by organized interest groups, civil organizations skilled in lobbying, and bureaucrats who monopolize administrative information. In such cases, grassroots democracy degenerates into "rule by entrenched interests without residents."
Currently, it is difficult to overcome this "democratic deficit" with only the existing resident self-governance system. The Resident Self-Governance Act passed on March 31 limits resident self-governance councils to the level of eups (towns), myeons (townships), and dong (neighborhoods), making them closer to auxiliary administrative bodies dependent on the Ministry of the Interior and Safety's reference ordinances and heads of local autonomous governments. Eup, myeon, and dong units, ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of residents, are still far too large for residents to feel their self-governance capabilities and participate directly. As megacities grow larger, the resident self-governance units that check and balance them should logically become smaller and more granular.
It is time to change our thinking. Instead of city, county, or district mayors mobilizing residents, we must shift to "autonomous resident self-governance councils" where residents organize and operate themselves. To achieve this, a "Resident Self-Governance Act" with the status of an "autonomous ordinance" or "resident referendum law" needs to be enacted as a special law.
In this special law, administrative units should be subdivided not into eups, myeons, and dongs, but into tongs (neighborhoods), bans (blocks), ris (villages), and further down to apartment complexes or dong (building) level living communities. Like the parish councils in the UK, residents should hold general meetings and directly elect self-governance committee members to form democratic resident self-governance councils. Additionally, resident self-governance councils must be empowered to exercise direct democracy rights such as proposing local ordinances, requesting resident audits, initiating resident recalls, holding resident referendums, and participating in budget deliberations. Only then will local assemblies and heads of local autonomous governments become supporters who spare no administrative or financial support according to the "principle of subsidiarity."
in OPINION
