The Korea Democracy Barometer Surveys: Unraveling the Cultural and Institutional Dynamics of Democratization, 1997-2004

In 1991, Richard Rose of the Center for the Study of Public Policy at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland, commenced the New Democracies Barometer surveys and the New Russia and Baltic Barometer surveys in order to compare the mass experience of democratization in post-Communist countries (Rose, 1998, 2000). Since 1995, Mata Lagos of Market Opinion Research International in Santiago, Chile, has been conducting the Latinobarometer surveys on an annual basis to trace and compare the levels and sources of popular support for democracy and democratic reforms in fifteen Latin American countries and Spain (Lagos, 1997, 2001). [...]there is a growing tendency among political scientists and development planners to equate democracy with the occurrence of the mass public's free, fair, and competitive elections of political leadership on a regular basis. [...]repeated surveys of a cross-section of the adult population over time make it possible to reveal and compare the dynamics of trajectories of democratic change. By tracing changes in the democratic perceptions of the past regime and the authoritarian perceptions of the current regime, it also ascertains the shifting qualities of democratic citizenship (Shin et al., 2005). [...]the KDB was the first democracy barometer program that investigated democratization as a dynamic process of ongoing interactions between individual citizens and institutions of their democratic regime.