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7 การประชุมวิชาการ
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support for, cognitive understanding of, and behavioural commitment towards

democracy. Support for democracy is a multilevel phenomenon because citizens
simultaneously realign their commitment towards democracy as an ideal and as a
practice (Rose et al. 1998). Democratic support is also dynamic in that it
accompanies attachment to democracy on the one hand and detachment from

authoritarianism on the other (Foa and Mounk 2016). Finally, support for democracy
is sequential in that citizens agree with the demise of authoritarian rule first and
then endorse the introduction of democratic institutions in the politics of democratic
transition (Shin 2021). Likewise, new democracies can consolidate when ordinary

people approve newly installed democratic institutions and stop considering
authoritarian alternatives.

Over the last three decades, international and national research institutes have
developed measures of democratic support and compared cross-national differences

in democratic legitimacy. Nonetheless, despite scholarly consensus on the relevance
of democratic support, there is a lack of agreement about its measures, and
different surveys track citizen reactions to democratisation in different periods and
phases. Regarding the case of South Korea, the Korea Barometer Survey

investigated citizens’ attitudes toward democracy from 1996 to 2010 and the Asian
Barometer Survey has examined public opinion about democracy since 2003.

For this chapter, I chose the World Values Survey (hereafter, WVS) because

it has regularly examined support for democracy and authoritarianism over more
than two decades since 1996. I employed the five waves of the WVS: 1996
(1,249 respondents), 2001 (1,214), 2005 (1,200), 2010 (1,200), and 2018 (1,245).
The WVS asked what South Korean citizens thought about having democracy and
two authoritarian rules (strongman and military) and allowed respondents to express

this as a 4-point Likert scale from a very good to a very bad way of governing this
country.

These measures are useful in unravelling a sequential and dynamic pattern of
regime support during the past decades for two reasons: (1) The two authoritarian

rules are practical alternatives to democracy among South Korean citizens because
การอภิปราย strongman rule is spreading around the world and military rule is the specific regime

they directly experienced before the 1987 democratic transition. (2) Declining

support for democracy and increasing support for authoritarianism constitute