This article examines how people's confidence in their governments changed in the context of South Korean decentralisation. South Korea provides a unique case to answer the question because it is one of the world's most rapid modernisers and has maintained autonomous local systems across three decades of decentralisation. Analysing data from the first and fourth wave of the Asian Barometer Survey in a seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) model, we find that the trust function of the local governments correlates with the trust function of the national government in 2003 and then disappears in 2015. We understand this finding as a piece of indirect evidence that South Korean local autonomy encourages local government trust, which does not reflect merely trust in the national government. This article also discusses the need for normalisation of the National Assembly, the creation of regional political parties and the dispersion of presidential power.

This article assesses the role of local councils as a conduit for democratic consolidation through the examination of the legislative performance of the members of a South Korean metropolitan city council. We collected data on ordinance proposals in Busan Metropolitan Council from 2006 to 2018 (the 5th to 7th Councils) and analysed, first, the effects of individual attributes of local council members on legislative performance through negative binomial model analysis and, second, the effects of legislative networks on council members' performance. Three findings contribute to the literature: first, the number of proposed ordinances by council members increased over time, while those by the mayor decreased in the same period, suggesting an erosion of executive dominance of policymaking in local councils. Second, female and newly elected council members are most active in legislative proposals, which underlines that these members are more connected to the electorate than long‐serving incumbents. Third, network analyses show increasingly diverse and multi‐centred communities behind ordinance proposals; this suggests a move from personalistic politics to institutionalised politics.

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