Resilience of Democratic Institutions: lessons from Korea's impeachment trials

Will democratic institutions prevail in the face of far-right narratives and misinformation? We compare the effects of two democratic institutions on public opinion, against the effects of far-right influencers. We exploit the political situation in the Republic of Korea to empirically examine our question. On 3 December 2024, President Yoon Suk Yeol launched an unsuccessful self-coup d’état. He was subsequently impeached by the legislature and arrested, currently facing an impeachment trial at the country’s Constitutional Court. The Court is expected to announce its decision in mid-March. We will conduct a survey experiment in the days before and after the Court announces its decision. The court ruling will serve as a natural experiment allowing us to estimate the effect of the Court’s decision on the public’s support of Yoon, as well as people’s trust in the country’s democratic institutions. We consider (far-right) social media exposure as a potential moderator. To operationalise this variable, the survey will randomly assign respondents to short video clips that contain contested (mis-)information (e.g., about conspiracy theories related to the impeachment) or a neutral/objective reporting of the ongoings.