This thesis investigates democratisation in South Korea. Unlike what structure- and process-oriented accounts of democratisation claim, democracy in South Korea was achieved through sustained popular action. The late-late development led by the authoritarian developmental state did not allow bourgeois or institutional politics to take the leading role for democracy. Social movements replaced them by making political opportunities and developing collective identity, their mobilising structures, and by using various discourses, repertoires, and framing. The structural context, movements' interaction with the state, and their strategies produced democracy with paradoxical results. Not only did they fail to achieve social democracy as their objective, but also the “founding election” for the transition to democracy in 1987 was exploited by elites. The paradoxical process of democratisation suppressed the reverse transition to reauthoritarianism on the one hand and constrained the popular sovereignty expressed through constitutionally legitimate massive collective action on the other hand. Though democratisation through collective action did not end “happily ever after,” it brought about democracy not only in institutional politics but also in noninstitutional politics. / Graduate