THE QUALITY OF MASS SUPPORT FOR DEMOCRATIZATION

Since the dramatic collapse of communist rule in Central and Eastern E urope, political scientists and sociologists have been conducting nati onal sample surveys to monitor the support of mass publics for the tra nsformation of authoritarian political systems into democracies. Much of their research to date, however, has been concerned primarily with its quantitative characteristics i.e., levels or amounts of mass prefe rence for democracy or of mass commitment to the democratic political procedures of participation, competition, and tolerance. This paper se eks to examine qualitative characteristics of mass support for democra tization. To this end, it proposes and tests a multi-dimensional model of democratic support with a set of national sample survey data recen tly collected in Korea.