Spill-Over Policy Feedback: How Elderly Care Policy Accelerated Disability Rights Legislation in South Korea

In April 2007, the South Korean government revised the Act of Welfare for People with Disabilities to create a legal basis for implementing the first national-level personal assistant services for persons with disabilities. Yet, only four years later, in January 2011, a separate ‘Act on Activity Assistant Services for Persons with Disabilities’ was enacted. Why did South Korea create a new, independent law so soon for a service that already had a legal basis? To address this empirical puzzle, this research asks how policy feedback from the long-term care insurance for older people, adopted in 2007, shaped the legislation of the Act on Activity Assistant Services for Persons with Disabilities. Policy feedback literature suggests that existing policy exerts self-reinforcing or self-undermining effect on the subsequent policy development through various mechanisms (Béland et al., 2022). Building on this, this study further examines how the adoption of social long-term care insurance that excluded people with disabilities under the age of 65 significantly contributed to a rapid legal transition for personal assistance services. This study analyzes parliamentary minutes, government reports, and disability movement organizations’ statements thematically. Supplementary interviews with key informants, such as government officials, politicians, researchers, and disability activists, will be integrated where possible. This study hypothesizes that the adoption of long-term care insurance that only covers people aged 65 above enhanced the recognition of care services for people with disabilities as rights, provided disability movement with a strong legitimizing rhetoric with which they could require the legislation of a separate law, and offered lessons about how to design a necessary administrative system. The findings will reveal that existing policy may not only exert self-reinforcing or -undermining effects, as existing policy feedback literature suggests, but also shape the trajectory of related but distinct policy fields.