Doh Chull Shin

• Researcher at University of California, Irvine

This chapter examines the processes of democratization in East Asia over the past two decades. It first provides a historical background on transitions to democracy in the region before assessing the extent to which third-wave democracies have consolidated by appraising the quality of their performances. Analyses of Freedom House and the World Bank...

Warum bleiben so viele Bürger neuer Demokratien auch nach Jahrzehnten demokratischer Herrschaft dem Erbe der autoritären Vergangenheit fest verbunden? Tun sie dies aufgrund der besonderen Art der Kultur, die sie tagtäglich leben? Wenn Kultur so wesentlich ist, formt sie dann die Unterstützung der Bürger für autoritäre Staatsführung direkt oder indi...

Most new democracies face a challenge of reshaping the political culture to support the new democratic political order. This can often be a long-term process, complicated by the Realpolitik of governing in a new political (and often economic) system. One of the mechanisms of cultural change is generational change. New generations socialized after a...

Is democracy emerging as the universally preferred political system, as advocates of the global democratization thesis claim? This paper seeks to explore this question in the context of East Asia, a region known for democratic underdevelopment. To this end, we first provide a critical review of how previous survey-based studies were conducted to es...

Over the past three decades, democracy has made remarkable progress. Public opinion research on democratization in a wide variety of cultures and contexts show that democracy has achieved overwhelming mass approval throughout the world and has become virtually the only political model with global appeal. Despite this trend, questions remain as to h...

Most new democracies face a challenge of reshaping the political culture to support the new democratic political order. This can often be a long-term process, complicated by the Realpolitik of governing in a new political (and often economic) system. One of the mechanisms of cultural change is generational change. New generations socialized after a...

The debate over the future of East Asian democracy centers largely on the fit between democratic values and the Confucian way of life. Some interpret Confucianism's hierarchical, communitarian, and anti-pluralistic values as a roadblock to democratic consolidation. Others interpret the Confucian traditions of dissent and accountability as comparabl...

This article presents an analysis that highlights the regional differences in institutional and cultural dynamics, by comparing the reactions of citizens to democratic change across these regions. It explains the notion of democratization and also clarifies several key conceptual issues. It studies the evolution of the current wave of global democr...

In this study, we proceed on the assumption that where the rule of law prevails, parliament becomes the key institution of democratic governance. To transform delegative or limited democracy into a truly representative democracy, it is necessary to ensure not only vertical but also horizontal accountability. This study considers the horizontal dime...

This article uses data from 15 U.S. cities to explore the ways in which the use of subjective measures of service satisfaction can redirect distributional research from the question of who gets how much to the more policy-relevant question of who gets how much of what is needed. It suggests a useful approach to the use of subjective indicators to p...

The consolidation of nascent democratic rule requires ordinary citizens to have certain basic qualities of democratic citizenship. To understand these qualities, this study proposes and explicates the notion of citizen sophistication with regard to democratic politics in South Korea, a country widely regarded as one of the most successful new democ...

South Korea is widely known as an Asian model of economic development and democratization. Yet until now, research has not shown whether the country’s successful transition to democracy and market capitalism has enabled ordinary citizens to experience a life of happiness and satisfaction in their private and public lives. To address this question,...

The Republic of Korea (hereafter “Korea”) has been widely regarded as one of the most vigorous and analytically interesting third-wave democracies. During the first decade of democratic rule, Korea has successfully carried out a large number of electoral and other reforms to transform the institutions and procedures of military–authoritarian rule i...

This paper addresses an aspect of the financial crisis in South Korea that has not been dealt with in depth. The question that will be analyzed is: how does the general population perceive the crisis? In attempting to answer this question we rely on new representative survey data, covering the years 1998 and 1999. Specifically, respondents voice th...

Countries in the third wave of democratization have introduced competitive elections before establishing basic institutions of a modern state such as the rule of law, institutions of civil society and the accountability of governors. By contrast, countries in the first wave of democratization became modern states before universal suffrage was intro...

The central argument of this paper is that, rather than simply absorbing democratic values diffusely, Koreans have acquired their support for democratization incrementally through experience with the consequences of regime change. In order to account for this pattern, we develop an empirical model that distinguishes between democracy as an ideal (d...

This paper tests a model of cross-national variation in participation, using survey data from Spain, Brazil, and Korea. We posit a continuum ranging from neighborhood ties through membership in voluntary associations to political participation. The gap between Spain and peer countries grows as the continuum shifts from prepolitical to political sph...

Since the dramatic collapse of communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe, political scientists and sociologists have been conducting national sample surveys to monitor the support of mass publics for the transformation of authoritarian political systems into democracies. Much of their research to date, however, has been concerned primarily with...

This study examines the growth of popular support for a competitive multi‐party system as an indicator of democratic consolidation in South Korea. Using a national sample survey conducted in November 1993, it demonstrates that the South Korean mass public has been very slow to develop affective, behavioural, cognitive and evaluative links to politi...

This article synthesizes significant findings of theoretical and empirical research on the third wave of democratization. It addresses a number of central questions. What changes have been taking place in the study of democracy and democratization over the past two decades? How have the concepts of democracy and democratization been redefined for a...

The educational reforms by the states in the early 1980s were aimed at toughening the school environment and enriching student learning. Critics said that gains in schooling and learning are incompatible goals. We found small but consistent gains in learning, but inconsistent consequences of reform on schooling. State-imposed reforms accomplished m...

Anthropologist Mary Douglas and political scientist Aaron Wildavsky have proposed a theory that people's political preferences are shaped largely by the culture in which they prefer to live. This study tests their theory with public opinion data recently collected from the Republic of Korea. Secondary analysis of the data reveals that upholders of...

Economic indicators such as per capita GNP have persisted as the principal means of evaluating the development plans as well as the policy achievements of Third World countries. There has been, however, an increasing awareness that these measures are inadequate to assess the negative spillover effects of economic growth and are an inaccurate indica...

This paper reports and analyzes the quality of life perceptions held by the inhabitants of two culturally different but demographically similar cities: Springfield, Illinois and Aix-en-Provence, France. Although the Springfielders expressed greater satisfaction than the Aixois in virtually all the life domains covered by the research, the areas of...

This paper reports and analyzes the quality of life perceptions held by the residents of two culturally different but demographically similar cities: Springfield, Illinois and Aix-en-Provence, France. Although the Springfielders expressed greater satisfaction than the Aixios in virtually all the life domains covered by the research, the areas of re...

Use of subjective indicators in the many efforts of comparative evaluation of community life has been confined primarily to the estimation of the proportions of people who are satisfied or dissatisfied with their life experiences. A sample of 1,488 persons in seven Illinois cities were interviewed by telephone and asked to rate their satisfaction w...

Politicians and decision-makers in both developed and developing countries have sought to maximize economic growth on the basis of the belief that this leads to advances in the quality of life. This paper seeks to test whether this belief is well-founded. An application of the Diffusion Index to time-series data collected from a rapidly growing, lo...

The concept of happiness has been mistakenly identified with feelings of pleasure in recent studies of quality of life. This paper clarifies the meaning of the concept happiness and establishes grounds for its proper use in scholarly research. In addition, an empirical test of four major accounts of happiness derived from a careful review of philos...

This article presents a systematic discussion of the concept of the quality of municipal services. Based upon the argument that service quality is a subjective and collective experience of the citizenry, the quality of municipal service is conceptualized is the interaction of two components: (1) the level of citizen satisfaction with the service an...

Abstract will be provided by author.