Illuminating the Sewol Ferry Disaster using the institutional model of punctuated equilibrium theory

The Sewol Ferry Disaster undermined the South Korean government's efforts to establish the country as a crisis-free region. Considering the number of fatalities and the immensity of the disaster, the South Korean legislators passed three acts concerning the Sewol Ferry Disaster: the Sewol Special Act, the Government Organization Act, and the Yoo Byungeun Act. The strength of this study is that it illuminates the Sewol Ferry Disaster using the institutional model of the punctuated equilibrium theory (PET), applied in a Korean setting. Moreover, it elucidates the concept of punctuated events and their impact on budgets and public attention, primarily using Google Trends, as it examines policy changes following the disaster and demonstrates inconsistencies in the PET. The authors conducted a case study on the Sewol Ferry Disaster and the three subsequent Sewol Acts to illuminate the effect of the disaster on policy processes. Using the prior history of punctuated events in South Korea, we demonstrated a higher propensity for punctuation and the functions of positive feedback after the policy monopoly collapse that followed the Sewol Ferry Disaster in South Korea. We also demonstrated that fewer instances of negative feedback are observed in South Korea than in the United States. Based on these findings, PET can be applied and developed a larger number of different settings by future studies. (C) 2019 Western Social Science Association. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.