The question about how culture shapes the possibilities for successful democratization has been a controversial issue for decades. This article maintains that successful democratization depends not only on the distribution of political interests and resources, but to seriously challenge a political regime, the advocates of democracy require cultural legitimacy as well. Accordingly, the central question is how democratic ideas are connected to the broader culture of a social community. This issue will be addressed in the case of South Korea. The Minjung democracy movement challenged the military regime by connecting democratic ideas concerning popular sovereignty and human rights with cultural traditions. The dissidents substantiated democratic values by (1) articulating an alternative concept of political representation against the authoritarian regime, (2) increasing the cultural resonance of their concept by linking democratic ideas to traditional narratives and practices, (3) developing a rich dramaturgical repertoire of collective action, and (4) mobilizing public outrage by fusing the above three elements within historical situations.The question concerning how culture shapes the possibilities of successful democratization has been a controversial issue for decades. Since the end of World War II, the debate has been dominated by two paradigms: the normative paradigm of classical modernization theory stresses the importance of a favorable political culture (Lipset 1959:92-93; Huntington 1984:207); the rationalist paradigm of conflict theory accentuates the distribution of economic and political power (Przeworski 1991;Rueschemeyer et al. 1992). The main difference between the two paradigms is the way they conceptualize the relation between values and actions. While the first assumes an almost deterministic effect of values, the latter neglects them. However, as Joas (1996) andEisenstadt (1979) pointed out, cultural values actually give actors an orientation, but they are too general to bring about a specific institutional outcome. From the perspective of a theory of creativity, "an adequate understanding of values in human action has to conceptualize instead the interaction between values embodied in prereflective aspirations and the situation where we establish which course of action accords with our values. This concretization or specification of values is an exercise in the creativity of action" (Joas and Beckert 2002:274). Accordingly, the question is not whether a given set of cultural values is compatible with democracy or not but rather how creative actors more or less succeed in specifying basic democratic ideas of popular sovereignty and human rights.Referring to current discussions about the "performative turn" (2006) in sociology, this article develops a model to analyze the cultural dimension of regime changes on the empirical case of South Korea. Given that the legitimacy of a political system *