안전하고 신뢰할 수 있는 토토

[정치외교학부 10-10 사업단]

SEOUL POLITICAL SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS RESEARCH SYMPOSIUM (SPIRS) SERIES

How Can "The People" Keep Democracy Alive?

Jonathan Art Chu
Presidential Young Professor,
Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy,
National University of Singapore

일시: 2025년 9월 19일(금) 14:00-15:30
장소: 우석경제관 복합세미나실(223동 108호)
* 행사는 모두 영어로 진행됩니다.
* 사전 신청 없이 참석 가능하며, 오프라인으로만 진행됩니다.

문의처: 정치외교학부 10-10 사업조교 (lveronica93@snu.ac.kr)

Abstract: Decades of research have attempted to document how the mass public understands and values democracy. Despite this large body of research, the literature lacks a comprehensive framework to motivate why and under what conditions does public opinion matter to democracy in the first place, and subsequently, what factors weaken democracy as it relates to the mass public. To fill in this gap, this essay argues that there are two fundamental requisites for such citizen drive or "bottom-up" democratic resilience to exist. First is the focal point requirement, which postulates that citizens must share a sufficiently common understanding of what democracy is in the first place and whether the political occurrences in their society constitute democratic or anti-democratic behavior. Second is the activation requirement, which postulates that citizens must sufficiently value democracy as a political system both intrinsically but also relatively to other social, economic, and political goods, to the extent that they are willing to make sacrifices and trade-offs to ensure its survival. Given these two foundations of democratic resilience, four anti-democratic tactics are particularly dangerous: detractors of democracy can redefine, reorient, hijack, and smear the understanding and value of democracy among the citizen masses. Ultimately, this new framework provides systematic ways to document, diagnose, and address the vulnerabilities that democracy faces from the people themselves.