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institutional backsliding of democracy is negligible in the West. Owing to their
analyses, they judge that the thesis of democratic deconsolidation is by and large
exaggerated.

This academic debate raises a question about who defends South Korean
democracy and who drives its deconsolidation. To determine ordinary citizens of
democratic consolidation and deconsolidation in South Korea, I chose three actor-
centric theories of democratic development: elite competition, neo-modernisation,
and political competition. First, drawing from Moore’s famous statement about

“no bourgeoisie, no democracy” (1966), scholars of the elite competition theory
contend that democracy is likely to advance as the rising economic class demands
democracy and constrains the top incumbent elites of politics and economy (Ansel

and Samuels 2014). Thus, a credible demand for democracy is expected to come
from the upper and middle classes of Korea, rather than from those who remain
poor.

Second, following Inglehart’s initiative, scholars of the neo-modernisation

theory have proposed the cultural theory of stable democracy, whereby social
modernisation leads to democratic change as those with cognitive resources such
as educational attainment and political interest are attached to democracy and
detached from authoritarianism (Inglehart and Welzel 2005). This model indicates

that college-educated citizens with political interest are supportive of democracy
over authoritarianism.

Finally, building on Schattschneider’s famous statement, “the political parties
created democracy” (1942), the political competition model presents the view that

democratic change follows as existing political cleavages see opportunities from
electoral and non-electoral methods to instigate political cleavages and mobilize
supporters to maximize the parties’ political interests (Ziblatt 2017). This model
logically suggests that democratic support varies across two major cleavages of

South Korean politics: ideological and generational.

To evaluate the shifting citizenship for the last decades, I focus on two broad
การอภิปราย types of regime supporters (full democrats and hybrids) and examine how these

two varied across the following six variables in 1996 and 2018: subjective social
class, income, education, political interest, ideology, and generation. For a simple
comparison, I have transformed all the variables into binaries or ordinals.