The Mass Dynamics of Democratization and Quality of Life: The Korean Experience

9409835 Shin在过去十年中，致力于考察民众对威权统治民主变革的支持的主要研究工作有所增加。政治学家和社会学家团队对东亚、东欧和南欧以及拉丁美洲新兴民主化国家的民众进行了全国抽样调查。从这些调查中，人们对民主的水平、趋势和群众支持的来源有了很多了解。然而，从这些调查中，人们对民主化的群众支持力度知之甚少。大众公民中的哪些部分继续支持民主化？哪些部门已经停止了对它的支持？是什么促使一些人改变了他们的民主支持？毫无疑问，这些问题对于制定巩固新生的民主统治的适当战略至关重要。然而，在最近积累起来的关于民主化大众文化的大量文献中，这些问题没有得到充分的解决。本研究旨在从普通公民对自己和国家的生活质量体验和设想的角度来解决这些具有战略意义的问题。具体地说，这项研究假设，每个公民对民主化的反应是，他们对民主化过去如何影响他们的生活质量的看法以及他们对它将如何影响他们未来生活质量的期望做出反应。这一假设将通过从韩国收集的一组新的大规模调查数据来验证，韩国在过去五年里在建立民主政治文化方面取得了相当大的进步。

9409835 Shin The past decade has seen a growth in major research efforts dedicated to the examination of popular support for democratic transformations of authoritarian rule. Teams of political scientists and sociologists have conducted national sample surveys of the mass publics of newly democratizing countries in Est Asia, Eastern and Southern Europe, and Latin America. From these surveys, much is known about levels, trends, and sources of mass support for democracy. From the surveys, however, there is little known about the dynamics of mass support for democratization. Which segments of the mass citizenry have continued supporting democratization? Which segments have discontinued their support of it? What has motivated some to modify their democratic support? Undoubtedly these questions are crucial to formulating an appropriate strategy for consolidating nascent democratic rule. Yet these questions have not been addressed adequately in the large body of literature which has recently accumulated on the mass culture of democratization. This research investigation seeks to address these questions of strategic significance from the perspective of life quality which ordinary citizens experience and envision for themselves and their country. Specifically, the study hypothesizes that individual citizens react to democratization in response to their perceptions of how it has affected the quality of their life in the past and their expectations of how it would affect the quality of their life in the future. This hypothesis will be tested with a new set of mass survey data to be collected from Korea, a country which has made considerable progress in establishing a democratic political culture over the past five years.