How Does Democratic Regime Change Affect Mass Political Ideology? A Case Study of South Korea in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

ABSTRACT. This article explores the ideological dynamics of democratic regime change in South Korea from a comparative perspective. Analyzing national sample surveys conducted during the first decade of democratic rule, we find that the democratization of the country's rightwing dictatorship has resulted in a movement of many South Koreans from the right to the left on the ideological spectrum. However, many of the South Koreans who have shifted their position on the spectrum have done so without changing their thinking about what "the left" and "the right" represent. This particular pattern of ideological dynamics that features change in identification, but continuity in content, confirms two distinct theories. As expected from the theory of democratic human development, democratization provided South Koreans with a wide array of legal rights allowing them to think freely. As expected from the theory of political socialization, however, the content of the thinking retains an old, authoritarian conception of rule. Unlike the democratization of political institutions, which can be achieved in a few years, the democratization of mass political thinking appears to be an intergenerational phenomenon that requires more than a decade for completion.

How do Citizens in East Asian Democracies Understand Left and Right?

“…Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, democracy itself may strengthen the sociological and attitudinal underpinnings of left–right orientations by allowing articulation and debate of issue positions from across the ideological spectrum (see Shin and Jhee, 2005). In contrast, authoritarian governments frequently restrict any such expressions except for ones buttressing the regime, and depict alternative ideologies as illegitimate, in effect curtailing the available ideological space open to contestation.…”

“…This last set of factors, which may be especially pertinent in societies that have only recently transitioned from authoritarian rule, warrants some elaboration. Due to conflicts leading up to democratization, in new democracies ‘the democratic–authoritarian dimension may overshadow the classical conflict over issues of economic redistribution and define the central meaning of left and right’ (Moreno, 1999: 2), as ‘democratization of a right-wing dictatorship shifts the masses to the left, while the democratization of a left-wing dictatorship shifts them toward the right’ (Shin and Jhee, 2005: 394). The following paragraphs set out hypotheses regarding each of these variables.…”

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“…Analyzing eight West European democracies, Huber (1989) found that the partisan component does not generally dominate the issues component of these scales. More recently, studies have shown the substantive loading of the left-right scale in a variety of new democracies, including Russia (Evans and Whitefield 1998), South Korea (Shin and Jhee 2005) and other countries (Mainwaring and Torcal 2006). In this contribution, we start with the assumption that the left-right dimension does have a substantive meaning in all the elections analyzed -even though this substantive meaning may be limited to parts of the electorate with a higher education.…”

Risk society, anxiety and exit: A case study of South Korean migration decision-making

“…Notwithstanding the reality of North Korean threats, military-related ideological issues were often a bigger consideration in the decision to migrate. For more than 60 years both South Korean civil and military regimes have continuously promoted strong anti-communist ideas to the public, ‘proclaiming leftists as agents of the communist North’ (Shin and Jhee, 2005:382), and have used the left–right construct to challenge and to monitor the ideological positions of politically active citizens. For instance, South Korean politicians have frequently used ideological issues to strengthen their power and to whitewash major incidents such as political and corruption scandals (Shin and Jhee, 2005).…”