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

Summary and Conclusion South Korea formally began the democratization of its right-wing militarydictatorship in 1988. During the first decade of democratic rule, an increasingnumber of South Koreans employed left–right terminology to differentiate thepolitical world of the left from that of the center and right. At the same time, someof them steadily reoriented themselves toward the left and away from the right onthe ideological spectrum. With this leftward shift in ideological identifications,South Korea became one of the most left-wing new democracies in a relativelyshort period of democratization.More noteworthy than this shift alone is the fact that most South Koreans whoidentify themselves with the left sympathize with North Korea’s left-wing ideologyof communism. Unlike their peers, especially in southern Europe and LatinAmerica, these South Korean leftists do not represent a progressive force in favorof building democracy and capitalism in parallel. Of the three main ideologicalcategories of identification, those on the left are the least supportive of democrat-ization and marketization, while those on the right are the most supportive of suchreforms. Obviously, the substantive ideas stored in the ideological containerscalled the “left” and the “right” receive their meaning from the country’s ownhistory and political fate, a finding that accords with the notion of pathdependency, which argues that the authoritarian past shapes the democraticpresent (Bunce, 2000; Collier, 1999; Putnam, 1993).Evidently, the democratization of the right-wing dictatorship in South Koreabrought about a considerable expansion of the ideological space in whichordinary citizens think. Nonetheless, the content of their ideological definitionsremains, by and large, unchanged. This particular pattern of ideological dynamics,which features change in identification but continuity in content, confirms twodistinct theories. As expected from the theory of democratic human development,democratization provided South Koreans with a wide array of legal rights allowingthem to think freely. As expected from the theory of political socialization,however, the content of the thinking retains an old, authoritarian conception of