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evidence of democratic deconsolidation because democratic institutions were settled

during the mid-1990s. If an increasing number of South Koreans start to consider
authoritarianism as a good way of governing the country while living under
established democratic institutions, it indicates that democratic deconsolidation is
under way. For simplicity, I dichotomised the four responses into binary types:

support for democracy, strongman rule, and military rule.

4. CITIZENS’ SUPPORT FOR DEMOCRACY AND

AUTHORITARIANISM IN SOUTH KOREA, 1996–2018

Has mass support for democracy increased or declined in South Korea?

Have South Korean citizens realigned support for democracy and authoritarianism?
What type of regime supporters is emerging as a dominant trend? What does the
realignment of citizens’ support for democracy and authoritarianism imply for the
prospect of democracy in South Korea? These are imperative questions to evaluate

the state of and prospects for democracy in South Korea. To answer these
questions, I take three sequential steps. First, I examine the degree to which South
Korean citizens have been supportive of democracy and authoritarianism over the
last decades. Second, I construct a typology of regime supporters and track their

changes in the varieties of regime supporters such as democrats, hybrids,
and autocrats over time. Finally, I investigate distributional changes of these types
across different social segments as well as time.

Figure 2. shows South Korean citizens’ support for the three different

regimes: democracy, strongman rule, and military rule. The striking upshot is that
mass support for democracy declined from 85% to 70% in the period from 1996
to 2018, whereas the public’s approval rates of strongman rule and military rule as
good ways of governance have steadily increased from 32% to 67% and 5%

to 17%, respectively, in the same period. การอภิปราย