The Cultural Base of Political Orientations in South Korea.

The object of this paper is, first, to investigate the changing patterns, if any, of broad sets of attitudes and of judgements of Koreans about society and, second, to analyze the relationship between these social values and their effects on mass political orientations. This project is particularly interested in addressing such questions as: Are peoples' values changing?; what kinds of value cleavages do exist and how do they affect political orientations?; how are values measured? In doing so, we will first review the theoretical literature on a discussion of the value change process -- why and when it occurs, the form it takes, and its empirical relationship to growing levels of cynicism and noncompliant behaviors and attitudes. The empirical analysis is based on the first, second, and fourth waves of the World Values Surveys (WVS) conducted in 1982, 1990, and 2002 in Korea (roughly from the authoritarian rule to the democratic transition and then to the period of consolidation). We will identify and analyze systematically to what extent these social values persist and/or are changing and their influence upon Koreans' political orientations, particularly protest potential. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]