First Author |  w/ Nam-kook Kim
The Korean Review of Political Thought 25(2): pp. 9 - 38

This paper addresses an alternative perspective on how the political role of grief ought to be understood and examined in a democratic context. Against previous literature’s focus on grief as a singular means for the elites to manipulate the masses, we suggest that grief possesses various traits that each take part in stimulating the masses to certain political reactions. By cross-analyzing Sophocles’ Antigone and Thucydides’ accounts of Pericles’ Funeral Oration, we explore how the democratic citizenry has been triggered into reactionary political behaviors through grief. Specifically, this study asserts that the emotion of grief contains two political traits – contagiousness and antagonism – that when triggered simultaneously, excite reactionary political movements from the masses.

Solo-Authored
A version of the paper presented at MPSA 22'

The conflicting evidence for democratic fatigue and support led to a surge of interest in citizens’ preferences for different conceptions of democracy, leading scholars to introduce novel measurement strategies and diversified conceptualizations. Most effort has gone into conceptually incorporating various normative models of democracy and devising indirect measurements to capture greater nuance in citizens’ preferences. I argue that a critical gap in this approach is the inability to capture the subjective idea of democracy in the public’s minds. Without a precise understanding of the discrepancy between “objective” measures used by scholars and subjective ideas of democracy in laypeople’s minds, any observation will become mere checks on whether certain parts of the public happen to agree with scholarly definitions of what democracy is. This study explores how the public is fragmented in its conceptions of what democracy is and ought to be and which features of democracy stand out as points of consensus and disagreement. To do so, this study uses Q-Sorting by asking research participants to rank-order a list of 36 statements on democratic features and factor analyzing their response sets to derive a list of conceptualizations of democracy that exist among the public. Complementing the Q-sorting with qualitative interviews, a list of key terms will be extracted from the newly found conceptualizations and cross-validated through adjacent questionnaires from various national survey datasets (i.e., CCES, WVS, BLW, ANES).

With Jeong-ho Choi
A version of the paper will be presented at the APSA Pol Comm Pre-Conference
A version of the paper has been presented at MPSA 24'

Over the past few decades, American discourse on democracy has presented a dramatic transformation from a reigning doctrine for the world to a system crumbling from within. While research on both the phenomenon of democratic backsliding and the public’s attitudes towards it has gained significant traction, the question of how the phenomenon has reached the public as political information requires further examination. This study contributes to the lively discourse by investigating the linkage between the phenomenon and the attitude. Specifically, we ask when and how the news media changes the way it portrays democracy. We argue that the news media’s framing of democracy changes over time, and significant shifts in framing occur after critical political events. To test the arguments, we develop a theoretical framework for examining how the news media communicates the quality of democracy to the public as political information in the American context. We create a dictionary of various conceptions of democracy using the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) typologies. We test the framework using state-of-the-art word embedding techniques on original New York Times op-ed data ranging from 2000 to 2021 (n=179,500) and two in-depth case studies. We find that the New York Times op-ed section has exhibited a gradual and significant shift in its portrayal of democracy over time, weakening the image of democracy as a liberal, freedom- and rights-granting enterprise and strengthening the image of democracy as a competitive, majoritarian, and elitist enterprise. We also find that our two cases – the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security and the election of Donald Trump in 2016 – significantly realign which dimensions of democracy get emphasized. Overall, we show that the news media translates political phenomena into varying images of democracy over time for its audiences.

Solo-Authored
A version of the paper presented at MPSA 22'

The recent surge of interest in citizens' preferences for different conceptions of democracy begs the following question: which conception of democracy takes dominance in the public, when, and how? This study conducts a large-scale content analysis of various American elite discourse data (1960-2020) to explore when dominant conceptualizations of democracy gain and lose traction in the political sphere. The content analysis identifies key terms connoting important democratic features across time, showing how dominant conceptions also change across time. Then, I show that during times of transition between dominant conceptions, elite and public discussions of democratic decline rise, hinting at the possibility that the current discussion of democratic decline and backsliding in America might stem more from a semantic, rather than a systematic, issue.