ABSTRACT

Socioeconomic homogamy is a prominent process for reproducing the social structure in preindustrial societies including East Asian countries. Although Joseon Korea was a centralized bureaucratic state under a king, the stratification system was unique by its ambiguity such that the previlege of an upper class was not officially confirmed. Since the social status was rather conferred by the reputation of the family, the quality of marriage relation was important for a man to be ranked as a central official. In this paper, we investigate patterns of social homogamy among elite families in the early Joseon Korea through empirical evidence of the relationship between official rank and spousal family background. We created a novel dataset by compiling the marriage network and official rank information of 14,508 individuals from the jokbos (族譜, genealogy) of 15 elite families and conduct an ordinal logit regression analysis to investigate whether spousal family background increases the probability of an individual being promoted in the bureaucracy. We find that the socio-political power of affinal kin has a greater effect on promotions than the descent and meritocratic effects. Particularly, the empirical evidence shows that marrying into a queen consort’s family increased the likelihood of an individual being ranked in a high position, which was beneficial for retaining the political power of him and the family. The study shows that marriage as a means of managing the socio-political inner circle of elite families, shaping the elites’ socio-political inner circle, built on the marriage network around a queen consort’s family to benefit the royal authority and the elite group.

摘要

社会经济同妻制是在包括东亚国家在内的前工业社会中再现社会结构的重要过程。朝鲜朝鲜虽然是一个国王统治下的中央集权官僚国家，但分层制度的独特之处在于其模糊性，以至于上层阶级的特权没有得到正式确认。由于社会地位是由家庭的声誉授予的，因此婚姻关系的质量对于一个男人被列为中央官员很重要。在本文中，我们通过官职级别与配偶家庭背景之间关系的经验证据来调查朝鲜早期精英家庭的社会同婚模式。我们通过汇编来自 jokbos（族谱，家谱）15个精英家庭，并进行序数logit回归分析，以调查配偶家庭背景是否会增加个人在官僚机构中晋升的概率。我们发现近亲的社会政治权力对晋升的影响大于血统和精英效应。尤其是经验证据表明，嫁入王妃的家庭会增加一个人获得高位的可能性，有利于保住自己和家族的政治权力。研究表明，婚姻作为管理精英家庭社会政治核心圈的一种手段，塑造精英社会政治核心圈，建立在围绕王妃家庭的婚姻网络上，造福皇室和精英群体。