While most theories of pluralism emphasize incremental changes in the public policy process, dynamic changes sometimes occur because individuals’ preferences for some policies are not fixed indefinitely. Specifically, punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) developed by Baumgartner and Jones (1993) offers an important extension of incrementalism to understanding the policy process by emphasizing two coexisting aspects of rapid and gradual policy change. Despite a theoretical contribution of PET in public policy studies, scholars have been negligent to see how applicable PET is to other countries.

Approaching the theory in a comparative context, we apply PET to understand the changes of welfare policy in South Korea. The Korean government has dealt with major welfare policies by two competing conceptions: universal basis that would necessarily increase welfare budgets and selective basis that would reduce or keep equilibrium based on costs and benefits. While it is observed that welfare policy in Korea has been relatively modest based on a selective welfare, it has shown abrupt change to move towards more universal welfare policy in response to the needs of the politics, economy, and society. In perceiving the nature of welfare policy changes in Korea, our paper is developed out of two questions: what degree of stability and dynamics have existed in welfare policy in Korea; and what has caused such dynamic changes to realize a universal value of redistribution.

Focusing on specific welfare programs, National Health Insurance, Public Pension Program, and Employment Insurance Program, we confirm empirically that the outputs of major welfare budgets are characterized by non-normal distribution. Based on major determinants of the rapid policy change that PET explains, we also find that the occurrence of events critical to welfare policy serves to amplify the punctuations in budgeting processes, the outputs of welfare budgets will be more punctuated during the congressional election years, the increased public opinion/media attention cause the large punctuation of welfare budget changes, the outputs of welfare budgets will be more punctuated for the periods of divided government.