Monitoring Mass Reactions to Democratization During the East Asian Economic Crisis

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The recent collapse of economic powerhouses in East Asia has generated a very rare opportunity to study the impact of economic crisis on the democratization of authoritarian regimes that produced economic miracles. The survey research project proposed here seeks to examine the dynamics of mass culture during the East Asian economic crisis in comparative perspective. To this end, the project undertakes annually a mass public opinion survey in South Korea for each of the next two years. Based on these annual surveys, it monitors and unravels the dynamics of popular orientations toward both democratic and authoritarian politics throughout the arduous process of the economic crisis. The patterns and sources of political attitudinal dynamics among the Korean mass public are compared and contrasted with what is observed in Central and Eastern Europe where authoritarian rule brought about economic poverty instead of prosperity. These research endeavors provide a new perspective on the continuing debate over whether "economic crisis undermines nascent democracies." They also provide a true test of whether citizens of those democracies are politically sophisticated enough to distinguish between the quality of governmental performance and the legitimacy of democracy itself. Most importantly, functional, institutional learning, and other theories of democratic cultural change are tested with a set of annual surveys conducted in the most prominent East Asian dragon state in order to expand and refine the literature on the third wave of democratization that builds on research conducted mostly in the West.