Master or Servant? Public Opinion, Polling, and Democratic Responsiveness in Korea

Описание: Taeku Lee, Professor of Political Science and Professor of Law, University of California Berkeley

Recorded on March 22, 2017

"Political responsiveness" is a foundation stone of modern democracies, entailing an expectation that governments will heed and reckon the interests and demands of the polities they govern over and for with some regularity. To date the political science study of responsiveness is largely the province of scholars of American politics and its presence sought by matching the timing of changes in public opinion (as measured by opinion polls) to the timing of legislative debate and decision. This paper aims to extend the parameters of the study of political responsiveness in several aspects. First, it examines responsiveness in non-U.S. contexts, with South Korea as the primary focus and comparisons to Taiwan and Japan. Second, it adopts a more critical standpoint on the nature of public opinion and its relation to polling and political responsiveness. Rather than assuming that polls correspond faithfully to mass opinion qua democratic publics, it unpacks this association by tracing the historical evolution of modern polling and assessing the quality of polling data as a measure of mass opinion. Third, rather than testing for the statistical congruence of polling data and legislative action, this paper relies principally on in-depth interviews of experts representing the organizational field of polling on elections and politics in Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. The (preliminary) findings show a far more multifaceted, if not democratically distressing, view of the relationship between polling, public opinion, and political responsiveness than previous, U.S.-based accounts of "rational publics."