| dc.description.abstract |
Although economic voting is a common phenomenon in most democracies, voters in young
democracies do not necessarily vote based on the economy because at the early stage
of democratization, the salience of political issues, regarding transition, overwhelms
economic issues. Similarly, economic voting has not been observed in newly democratized
South Korea since its first meaningful election in 1987. The absence of economic voting
in Korea has widely been attributed to the overriding effect of regionalism, the phenomenon
in which Jeolla and Gyeongsang natives vote for candidates born in their provinces.
Against this backdrop, this paper argues that economic voting recently gained strength
with 1) the consolidation of Korean democracy and 2) the traumatic experience of the
IMF. In the meantime, the pre-democratic resource allocation political division, regionalism,
has developed into the ideologies of native Jeolla and Gyeongsang voters today; liberal
Jeolla natives tend to value distributive justice and freedom of speech, while conservative
Gyeongsang natives value economic growth and security.
To support this theory, the study provides empirical evidence for the rise of economic
voting in Korea. The results of the empirical analysis are fourfold. First, a time
series regression model shows that economic voting in Korea is not observed over time
at the macro level. Yet, a correlation analysis shows that economic indicators have
stronger relationships with recent presidential electoral outcomes. Second, a multinomial
logistic regression model shows that both economic voting and regionalism are statistically
significant at the micro level. Third, an estimated effect analysis of the same data
shows that the variables in the order of the largest marginal effect on the electoral
outcome are: party identification, economic voting, and regionalism. Although the
overall impact of economic voting exceeds that of regionalism, the result is contrary
among Jeolla natives. Finally, a subset analysis shows that Jeolla and Gyeongsang
natives vote economically whereas those born elsewhere vote ideologically. This suggests
that the regional division has become an ideological division among Jeolla and Gyeongsang
natives. Taking all the results into consideration, both economic and democracy issues
in Korea seem to have become valence issues, as in other consolidated democracies.
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