Historical institutionalism and regionalism in South Korea

This thesis aims at developing a new argument to explain the rise of regionalism, by looking at the case of the liberalization of agricultural trade performed by South Korea in multilateral and regional agreements. The main argument uses a combination of historical institutionalism and two-level game approach to demonstrate how temporal effects, path dependency and feedback effects from successful and failed issue linkages promoted the use of preferential trade agreements to liberalize sensitive sectors.

Matthieu Foulon is a PhD student in the Department of Politics of the University of York, supervised by Dr Jappe Eckhardt and Dr Joao Nunes. Matthieu is interested in the study of the potential impact of tensions on global food markets (high prices, export bans, sanitary issues) on the known drivers of agricultural trade liberalization. Specifically, Matthieu is looking at the preferential trades agreements (PTAs) signed by South Korea in the wake of the 2008 food crisis, focusing on the influence of external shocks on agricultural imports on the preferences of actors and domestic institutions at the core of the design of trade policy. His methodology is based on the analysis of documents and interviews with actors involved in the negotiation of PTAs, supported by process-tracing methods to identify the causal mechanisms that led to the liberalization of agricultural trade.

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