2022, Vol., No.29

Journal of the Scandinavian Society of Korea 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.21

pISSN : 1229-8646
https://journal.kci.go.kr/jssk

A first glance Korean and Danish seem to be seemingly far apart each other in every linguistic aspect, from the grammar over pronunciation to the written language, not to mention the elaborated polite-conjugations we find in Korean compared to the Danes’ habit of saying ‘you’ (‘du’) to just about everyone. However, both languages have, from the latter half of the 20th century to nowadays, received an enormous amount of loan words from English-American. If we look in to that, going all the way back to the Viking era in Scandinavia, when it was the Vikings lending out to the English (knife, guest, gift), we even find some rare and astonishing connections between Korean and Danish. In this article we go on a walk about Seoul in South Korea, exploiting the city a as linguistic space, looking at stores, shops, cafés, billboards, signs, and more on, chasing Old Norse that has made it all the way from the Viking age, over England and USA to Asia and Korea.

The annual event of ‘Almedalsveckan’ – ‘The Almedal Week’ held at the first week of July on Gotland in Sweden where every political party has attended has been existing since 1968. The political event for a variety of seminars, meetings, and garden talks has become a symbol for Swedish deliberative ‘Agora’ democracy. In spite of its history with accumulated data of speeches, debates and addresses, no single research analyzing addresses of party leaders has existed so far except for descriptive statistical studies of the event and participants. This article aims at filling this gap. Evening addresses given by two main party leaders representing Social Democratic Party and the Moderate Party were compared in this article. Two analytical tools, i.e. keyword analysis, on the one hand, and political discourse analysis on the other were adapted to explore the contents, symbols, ideas and arguments. This research based on semiotic exploration of core keywords detects that clear ideological differences between addresses of the two largest political parties have emerged in terms of perceptions of social issues, ideological stances, value orientation, policy goals and arguing claims on the prospective role and image of welfare state. More in-depth and broader interest in empirical studies of political address is argued to be of greater importance for better understanding of persuasive skills, consequences of the addresses and influence on political changes.

The purpose of this study is to elucidate the Swedish people’s attitude toward universal basic income(UBI) and related tax increases, and to identify the factors affecting the attitude. Overall, the number of respondents who expressed opposition to the introduction of the UBI was significantly higher than that of those who expressed support. Also, a negative attitude toward tax increases and the NOOMP(Not Out of My Pocket) phenomenon were identified. Opposition to the related tax increase was greater than those in favor. When the introduction of a UBI was accompanied by tax increase, opposition grew even greater. In the case of tax increase for the UBI, they preferred to achieve it through corporate tax and income tax on the rich. In general, opposition against the UBI and related tax increases was higher than support. But the degree varied depending on ideological tendencies, perceptions of tax burden, and preparedness for income loss. The more progressive, the more supportive of basic income and related tax increases. Conversely, the greater the perception of tax burden, the higher the negative attitude toward the UBI and related tax increases. The greater the preparedness for income loss, the higher the opposition to basic income. Basic income provides cash indiscriminately regardless of social welfare needs. In terms of social welfare effects, it is very inefficient. This may be the reason why basic income is not considered as a policy alternative in most welfare countries, including Sweden. Moreover, public trust in Sweden’s existing social security system is higher than in any other country. Therefore, it is analyzed that support for the UBI is significantly low in Sweden. Moreover, the fact that Swedish people are already paying high taxes to achieve a high level of social protection seems to reinforce the negative attitude towards the introduction of the UBI because it requires unbearable tax increase.