Authoritarian Successor Parties, Their Supporters, and Mass Mobilization: Lessons from Taiwan, South Korea, Mongolia, and Indonesia

Lunch talk by Myunghee Lee, Postdoctoral Fellow at NIAS - Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, University of Copenhagen

This is a hybrid event.
Join us in room 4.2.49 at CSS or sign up here to receive Zoom link

Abstract

Are authoritarian successor party (ASP) supporters more likely to protest? I argue that ASP supporters are less likely to protest in general. First, they are less likely to have protesting experiences. Moreover, they are less likely to be endowed with mobilization resources and organizations. The post-democratization mobilization environment is shaped upon the pre-democratization mobilization basis. During the pre-democratization period, protest was organized around the democracy movements. Since ASP supporters were less likely to emerge from the democracy movement, they are poorly endowed with protest experiences, techniques, and organizations. However, I argue that this effect varies based on the ASP qualities and supporters’ age. Supporters of ASPs that maintain strong pre-democratization legacies are more likely to participate in protests than supporters of ASPs that do not strongly highlight their authoritarian legacies. Also, older ASP supporters are more likely to participate in protests than younger ASP supporters when the ASPs’ characteristics are considered. Using both single-level and multilevel analyses, I examine four Asian countries with politically powerful ASPs and find evidence supporting my hypotheses. This study seeks to reveal authoritarian legacies among post-democratization citizens through ASP supporters’ protesting behavior. 

Keyword: Authoritarian Successor Parties, Political Protest, Democratization, Authoritarian Legacies

Bio

Myunghee is the Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen. She received her PhD in Political Science at the University of Missouri - Columbia. Her research focuses on protest, authoritarianism, and democratization. Her postdoctoral project is a comparative study on the persistence of authoritarian legacies in South Korea and Poland. Her work appears in journals such as International Security, International Studies Review, and Politics & Gender.

The format is 20-30 minutes presentation followed by discussion. Feel free to bring your own lunch.