This article series covers the Mortara Research Seminar, our flagship forum where guest scholars present their works-in-progress to our international affairs research community. Each week, a member of the Mortara community contributes an article summarizing the seminar’s discussions and key insights. For this piece, undergraduate research fellow Ashley Lin attended the seminar and spoke with the guest speaker. She reports on a compelling discussion with Professor Aram Hur of the Fletcher School, Tufts University.
On Monday, April 7, the Mortara Center welcomed Dr. Aram Hur of Tufts University as a distinguished guest for the weekly Mortara Research Seminar. Dr. Hur’s research focuses on nationalism and democracy, with special attention to issues of identity, integration, and democratic support in East Asia. She used the seminar to present ideas for her second book project, which draws on the theoretical framework developed in a paper she co-authored, titled “Democratic Ceilings: The Long Shadow of Nationalist Polarization in East Asia.”
Dr. Hur’s research challenges conventional views of democratic transition in Third Wave democracies in East Asia, like South Korea and Taiwan. Despite high scores on most democratic quality indexes, both have seen cyclical patterns of illiberal partisan competition, embodied by South Korea’s recent period of martial law. Dr. Hur argues this is not an indicator of democratic backsliding, but a result of “democratic ceilings” caused by nationalist polarization, which reframes political opposition as an existential threat and redefines the end goal of democratic competition as state capture. On a hopeful note, Dr. Hur observed that younger “born democratic” generations in both countries are less driven by nationalist cleavages that defined their parents’ and grandparents’ political identities, and more concerned with practical bread-and-butter issues. This may offer a catalyst for bipartisan institutional reforms and the redefinition of party platforms away from historical nationalist lines.
For Dr. Hur, this research topic is deeply personal. She describes the Asian Financial Crisis and South Korea’s national gold drive—when nearly a quarter of households donated personal gold to support the country—as a formative political memory. It sparked her interest in nationalism and the conditions under which it strengthens or undermines democracy. As a Taiwanese American who cares deeply about democracy in Asia and beyond, I found it interesting to explore the comparative dimensions of Dr. Hur’s work. After Dr. Hur’s presentation, we discussed how Taiwan also shows signs of “democratic ceilings,” evidenced by Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan gridlock and wave of political recall campaigns in early 2025. Similar to the case in South Korea, her research highlights the crucial role of young people in shifting political narratives away from nationalist cleavages, giving democratic norms a chance to deepen.