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).