No . 92 DEMOCRACY AS A LESSER EVIL : TESTING THE CHURCHILLIAN NOTION OF DEMOCRACY IN SOUTH AFRICA AND SOUTH KOREA

Winston Churchill asserted in 1947 that “democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. ” To date, this lesser-evil notion of democracy has been tested only in the post-communist societies of Eastern and Central Europe. As a result, little is known about how useful, or valid, this notion of democracy as a lesser evil is for analysing the popular perceptions of democracy among the mass publics of new democracies in other regions. To fill this gap in existing literature, this study analyses public opinion data from South Africa and South Korea. Our analysis of these data reveals that the Churchillian notion of democracy as a lesser evil is of limited use as an alternative paradigm for the study of democratisation, especially from the perspective of ordinary citizens in the midst of that political experience. “. democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. ” Winston Churchill, 1947 Why do ordinary citizens prefer to live in a democracy? Why do these citizens continue to support their democratic political systems even when those systems fail to function to their satisfaction? For the past decade, political scientists have proposed and tested a variety of theoretical models to address these and other related questions regarding mass reactions to the democratisation of authoritarian rule (Bratton, Mattes, and Gyimah-Boadi 2004; Camp 2001; Gibson, Duch, and Tedin 1992; Haerpfer 2001; Klingemann and Fuchs 1995; Linz and Stepan 1996; McDonough, Barnes, and Lopez Pina 1998; Norris 1999; Pharr and Putnam 2000; Rose, Mishler, and Haerpfer 1998; Shin 1999). The most unassuming of these models is derived from Winston Churchill’s eloquent assertion that “democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. ” 1 To Churchill, democracy was a form of government that performs badly but not as badly as non-democratic forms of government. In this conceptualisation, democracy no longer represents the ideals of freedom, equality, and justice that appear in the works of such political philosophers and theorists as John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and Robert Dahl (for a review of this literature, see Mueller 1999 and Powell Jr. 1982). Nor does it even represent a “kinder and gentler” form of government, which both ordinary citizens and political leaders in new democratic states have sought to establish since the current wave of global democratisation began three decades ago (Lijphart 1999). Democracy is viewed merely as a lesser evil, a view that directly challenges the idealistic or positive notion that has long been accepted in the theoretical and empirical literature on democracy (Bratton and Mattes 2001; Miller, Hesli and Reisinger 1997; Chu, Diamond, and Shin 2001). Moreover, the Churchillian notion that democracy constitutes a lesser evil directly challenges a growing body of literature on democratic consolidation. The existing literature emphasises the importance of the mass public embracing democracy for the consolidation of nascent democratic rule (Alexander 2002; Diamond 1999; Linz and Stepan 1996). In this literature, citizens are assumed to embrace democracy as “the only game in town” when they judge it to perform to their satisfaction. Rejecting this prevailing wisdom linking positive perceptions of a new democratic political system to popular support for democracy, the Churchillian notion of democracy offers an alternative approach to the study of democratic consolidation, as noted by Bratton, Mattes, and Gyimah-Boadi (2004) and Przeworski, Alvarez, Cheibub, and Limongi (2000). For Churchill’s quote to hold any truth, citizens must compare their own experiences of political life under democratic and undemocratic systems. The recent surge in democratic transitions in the various regions of the world has made this comparison possible, thereby making an empirical evaluation of this notion of democracy possible as well. To date, however, this proposition has been tested exclusively within the context of post-communist societies in East and Central Europe (Rose, Mishler, and Haerpfer 1998; Shin and Wells 2001). As a result, little is known about the validity of this lesser-evil notion for categorising perceptions of democracy in new democracies in other regions or about how much the lesser-evil perception shapes support for democracy. To address this gap in the literature, this study examines survey data from South Africa and South Korea, two new democracies that represent the most successful examples of democratisation in their respective regions. We use this data to ask, and answer, a series of empirical questions about democracy as a