New Korea Barometer Survey, 1997

<P>Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.</P><br>The Centre for the Study of Public Policy (CSPP) has conducted a series of Barometer surveys in Eastern Europe to gauge mass response to democratization. This project extends this research to the Republic of Korea. Because democratization has become a global phenomenon in the past two decades along with economic liberalization and marketization, this raises fundamental questions about the primacy of universalist theories of change. Much attention has focused on Post-Communist European countries (PCE) experiencing the double transformation to democracy and a market economy and comparisons with prior, albeit less radical changes in Southern Europe and Latin America. The Republic of Korea can add to our understanding of worldwide change, for it has experienced rapid economic success in the global economy, and subsequent rapid democratization and then economic crisis.<br>
While no country is 'typically' Asian, the Republic of Korea has an indubitable status as an Asian country - many centuries of history as an independent state, a Confucian and Buddhist tradition, and in its location between Japan and China in a non-geographical as well as a geographical sense. Korea began industrialization and entry into the global economy after Japan, but it has been spectacularly successful up to the 1997 economic crisis, becoming a member of OECD with a GDP per capita higher than any PCE country. It is a new democracy, as a military dictatorship ruled for decades before democratization began in the mid-1980s, and the first opposition candidate won a presidential election in 1997. Korea has parallels with Germany before 1990, as its neighbour North Korea still has an unreconstructed Communist regime.<br>
This survey is the sixth in a series of New Korea Barometer surveys, which have been conducted by Professor Doh Chull Shin since 1988. The previous five surveys are not held at the Data Archive. More information about the survey series may be found on the CSPP website at &lt;a href=http://www.cspp.strath.ac.uk/&gt; http://www.cspp.strath.ac.uk/&lt;/a&gt;.<br><B>Main Topics</B>:<BR><br>The questionnaire covers attitudes toward democracy, employment, social capital, trust and distrust, and expectations of fair and honest treatment by public officials. The questionnaire combines questions regularly included in interviews in Central and Eastern Europe and Russia, and also many questions asked in Professor Shin's previous five Korean surveys.