National Security Act : Authoritarian legacies in South Korea

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to examine the correlation between regime socialisation and censorship support in South Korea. The National Security Act is a policy that has been active in the country mentioned, since the 1950’s and restricts the freedom of speech. In a country like South Korea, which is a democracy, it is hard to understand the dual values that are being portrayed in the society. With the help of a theory about political socialisation by individual experience and by using a linear regression, this paper hypothesises that there will be people who are more supportive or completely against the backing for censorship if they have lived through an authoritarian regime. In the bivariate linear regression, the results indicate that there is a relation between the independent, regime socialisation and the dependent variable, support for censorship. However opposed to the theory of this paper, that inhabitants of countries with former authoritarian rule should be more supportive of censorship, the results from the multivariate linear regression show that with the control variables, gender, education, income and Asian values, the correlation between regime socialisation and the support for censorship is not statistically significant. Instead it shows that gender, education and income confound the relationship between regime socialisation and support for censorship.