National transparency: Global trends and national variations

We explore how the global norm, "transparency" has been adopted and changed in Korea from 1993 to 2006. While performing content analyses of three major Korean newspapers, we examine three aspects of transparency of Korean society: discourse per se, norm drivers, and actors. Our findings indicate that the early discourse on transparency mainly covers the technical aspect of outcome disclosure. In contrast, since the 2000s, the discourse has been shifted to illustrate the emergence of cultural and procedural transparency such as the accountable processes, participatory decision-making, and governance. Norm drivers have also changed from international and unilateral to domestic and multilateral ones. Recently we even observe selfalert drivers who ask for themselves to be held accountable and transparent. Actors to practice the norm of transparency in the recent period are more likely to be domestic ones, in particular, companies and private organizations. The implications of these results for the government, market, and society in general are discussed.