What’s Fair? Generational Class Consciousness in South Korea, with Aram Hur (Thursday Oct. 17, 2024)
Many aging democracies face two concerning phenomena: growing need for welfare and diminishing support for democracy among youth. Yet existing theories of economic voting cannot explain the confluence of these two trends. Using South Korea, an acute case, we show that generationally distinct beliefs about welfare deservingness—the result of differently lived developmental histories—yield distinct economic bases for democratic support. We combine text analyses of in-depth interviews, nationally representative surveys, and a survey experiment to show that while young voters base their democratic support on redistributive preferences, older voters weight these significantly less, instead evaluating democracy through the lens of economic growth. Generational class consciousness nuances the conventional understanding of democracy and redistribution and explains why some developmental states become trapped in a vicious cycle of low welfare and low democratic support.
About the Speaker:
Aram Hur is Assistant Professor of Political Science and the Kim Koo Chair in Korean Studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. Her research focuses on nationalism and democracy in East Asia. She is the author of Narratives of Civic Duty: How National Stories Shape Democracy in Asia (Cornell University Press, 2022), which won the 2023 Robert A. Dahl Award for best scholarship on democracy by an untenured scholar from the American Political Science Association. She is the 2021 Sherman Emerging Scholar from The Korea Society, a CSIS U.S.-Korea NextGen scholar, and recipient of the 2023 Gold Chalk Award for teaching from the University of Missouri, where she previously taught as faculty and served as Co-Director for the MU Institute for Korean Studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University, M.P.P from the Harvard Kennedy School, and B.A. with honors from Stanford University.