Woo Chang Kang

How does wartime violence affect public attitudes toward the government in the long run? In this paper, we examine whether violence against civilians during the Korean War continues to influence people’s attitudes toward the South Korean government more than half a century later. We find that wartime violence has clear long-term attitudinal effects. Using a difference-in-differences analysis that compares the cohorts born before and after the war, the findings indicate that people who experience

Existing studies—most importantly, Gomez, Hansford, and Krause—provide empirical support for an idea often embraced by popular media: The vote share of the Republican Party (as the percentage of total votes) increases when it rains, because the magnitude of decrease in turnout is larger among Democratic vis-à-vis Republican supporters. Considering the compositional nature of aggregated data, we show that the alleged Republican advantage derives in part from an increase in the number of votes for

Abstract We examine (1) how trust in foreigners and trust in political institutions affect attitudes toward immigration and (2) the moderating effect of economic development on those impacts, analyzing data from the fifth wave of the World Values Survey. We find that natives who trust foreigners are more tolerant toward immigration and that economic development positively moderates the impact of trust in foreigners on the attitudes. Meanwhile, we find only mixed evidence for the impact of trust

Abstract Regional bloc voting in South Korea has been ascribed to voters’ psychological attachments to birthplace. This article seeks to expand the existing discussion of regionalism by showing that economic conditions in voters’ places of residence affect vote choices at the individual level and produce clustering of votes at the aggregate level in South Korea. While the idea of residence-based regionalism has previously been suggested, empirical scrutiny of the idea has been limited. Exploitin

한국 유권자의 정서적 양극화가 심각한 수준으로 악화되고 있다는 언론과 학계의 우려에도불구하고, 이를 뒷받침할만한 실증적인 근거는 부재했다. 2000년 이후 실시된 6차례의 국회의원선거 유권자 여론조사 결과를 중심으로 한국 유권자들에게서 ‘과정’으로서의 정서적 양극화가진행되고 있는가를 검증했다. 집합수준과 개인수준의 분석 결과 한국에서 정서적 양극화가 심화되고 있다는 인식을 뒷받침할만 근거를 찾을 수 없었다. 집합수준 분석에서 당파성이 있는 유권자만을 대상으로 한 양극화 지수나, 무당파를 포함한 와그너 양극화 지수 모두 2004년에 가장높은 값을 기록했으며, 그 이후 2016년까지 감소하는 추세가 이어졌다. 2016년에서 2020년 사이에 정서적 양극화가 증가했지만, 2022년에 대한 추가적인 분석 결과 그러한 증가세가 지속되지는 않고 있음을 확인할 수 있었다. 강한 당파적 정체성, 이념강도와 같은 유권자의 개인적인 성향과 함께 정당의 이념적 위치에서 확인되는 정당의 이념적 양극화에

We study the poor’s psychological motivations to oppose income redistribution, relying on social identity and system justification theories. We find that national identification reduces differences between the poor and the rich in terms of attitudes toward income redistribution and self-esteem, by discouraging the poor from supporting redistribution but encouraging them to acquire greater self-esteem. Next, fatalism reduces and increases differences between the poor and the rich in terms of atti

Studies suggest that rainfall on an election day benefits the Republican Party in the United States and conservative parties in Western Europe. A common explanation is that marginal voters, whose turnout decisions can be affected by weather conditions, are more likely to be supporters of liberal parties. This paper shows that bad weather on an election day instead benefits the liberal parties in South Korea, where election days are designated as special holidays. Young voters, who tend to prefer