Antiauthoritarianism in the US and South Korea

A paper topic I've been thinking about in the past several years is Anti-authoritarianism around the world and its decline (that is, the rise of authoritarianism). As always, procrastination got in my way and I really haven't done anything on it. Recently, perhaps because of the election, it seems like an outcry of the rising authoritarianism in developed societies is not very uncommon. While I thought the argument has its merit, I wasn't really thinking of looking at the data even though I had a variable (the name is, you know, "anti-authoritarianism"), part of which was a central dependent variable of one of my published articles.

In my attempt to overcome Thanksgiving food coma this afternoon, I plotted a cross-national bar graph for this variable.

The variable antiauth captures individuals' Anti-authoritarianism (opposition to a military- or strongman rule) and each bar represents national average of the variable in each 'wave' of the Survey.

Both United States (yellow) and South Korea (green) showed their strongest anti-authoritarianism in the 1990s, which subsequently declined significantly in the 2000s. Recent presidential election results in both countries should make a certain amount of sense. To be fair, I didn't run numbers in any systematic way to see if these differences are actually statistically significant (yet).

I should really start working on this (after submitting what I've been working on, that is).

Presentation Template

So we're getting closer to the end of the semester, which means there should be a lot of student presentations going on. In my GLOA 605, which is an MA-level interdisciplinary research method class, this is a big deal. For two weeks, students present their research projects. Having taught this class before, I noticed (and found it somewhat inconvenient) 1) that they have very different styles of presentation which sometimes undermines fair grading and 2) that many students had never presented their work in a professional manner (!) and thus messed up with time management due to poor structure of the slides. That led me to make a template that everybody in class has to adhere to. It might sacrifice their creativity a little bit, but it's a formal training through which everybody is expected to garner certain types of skills.