The Architecture of Distrust: A Multi-Layered Semantic Network Analysis of Policy Resistance in South Korea’s Work–Life Balance Discourse Ecosystem

Republic of Korea’s total fertility rate (TFR) fell to 0.72 in 2023—the lowest globally—despite cumulative government spending exceeding USD 270 billion across four successive national plans since 2006. This study reframes this persistent policy challenge through the lens of systems thinking by examining whether the news discourse surrounding work–life balance policies exhibits structural features that may be associated with policy resistance. Employing a multi-layered semantic network analysis of 5509 news articles retrieved from the BigKinds database (December 2021–March 2026), we examine four expectations concerning structural integration, gendered representation, temporal change, and the affective profile of the discourse. The analysis combines co-occurrence-based centrality analysis, ego-network visualization, longitudinal network decomposition across three political periods, community detection with modularity optimization, and a descriptive sentiment layer. Core policy nodes such as “support” and “government” dominate degree centrality but exhibit near-zero betweenness centrality, a pattern consistent with structural fragmentation. The “male” node is structurally peripheral relative to the policy network, while longitudinal analysis shows a progressive weakening of integrative bridges alongside an expansion of cash-transfer discourse—a pattern we term the “Paradox of Support.” A descriptive sentiment layer indicates a substantial share of negative polarity overall (45.6%), with community-level differences that are modest and not used as confirmatory evidence. We interpret these structural findings through the lens of an “Architecture of Distrust”—an interpretive framework in which increased policy inputs may coincide with deepening fragmentation rather than integration. We are careful to present this as an interpretation of the observed structure rather than a demonstrated causal mechanism. Implications for leverage-point-based policy redesign are discussed.