Party Identification as a Cause of Electoral Choice
When the Political Party System Is in Flux: The Case of South Korea
Youseop Shin
Associate Professor
Department of Political Science & International Studies
Yonsei University
Fulbright Visiting Scholar
Department of Political Science
University of California, Berkeley
Address: 210 Barrows Hall, MC 1950
Berkeley, CA 94720
Phone: 510-908-0596 (mobile), 510-642-5633 (office)
E-mail: [email protected], [email protected]
Abstract
The partisan influence hypothesis that party identification is a cause of electoral choice
requires party identification to be more stable than electoral choice. However, unstable
party identification can be a cause of electoral choice, if consistency exists between old and
new party identifications under the influence of an exogenous factor. The purpose of this
article is to test this possibility. This article shows that in South Korea, party identification
significantly influences voting decisions because an exogenous factor of regionalism
predisposes voters to favor one political party over others, and although political party
system and party identification continually change, party identification is characteristically
stable in terms of the exogenous factor and significantly influences voting decisions.
* Prepared for delivery at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science
Association, March 28 – 30, 2013
1
Party identification has been a key factor in the study of electoral choice in a wide
variety of democratic systems. Studies testing the partisan influence hypothesis that party
identification influences electoral choice rather than the other way around have argued that,
if the hypothesis is to be supported, party identification should be more stable than electoral
choice.
These studies do not address two points. First, even when political party system
frequently changes with political parties being continually formed, split, merged, or
replaced with new ones, resultant unstable party identification can be characteristically
stable under the influence of an exogenous factor. If an exogenous factor that predisposed
voters to favor the old political party over others continues to predispose voters to favor the
new political party over others, voters’ identification with the old and new political parties
will be characteristically identical. Only the labels of political parties with which voters
identify will change.
Second, if the old and new political parties are characteristically identical, a feasible
explanation of electoral choice is possible according to unstable party identification. Thus,
the stability of party identification may not be the necessary condition for the partisan
influence hypothesis and evaluating the hypothesis in terms of the stability of party
identification may not be always an appropriate approach.
This article tests the possibility that unstable party identification influences electoral
choice, while focusing on the case of South Korea, in which political party system and
party identification are highly unstable. This article shows that consistency exists in
2
unstable party identification in terms of the exogenous factor of regionalism and unstable
party identification well explains electoral choice.
The Stability of Party Identification and Electoral Choice
Studies of the partisan influence hypothesis have focused on the stability of party
identification, assuming that party identification can serve as a cost-saving mechanism for
Downsian rational voters in making electoral choice (Downs, 1957) only when party
identification is more stable than electoral choice. In the United States, for example, party
identification has been shown to be highly stable (Abramson and Ostrom, 1991; Bartels,
2002; Campbell et al., 1960; Green and Palmquist, 1990; Green et al., 1998). Although the
view that party identification is highly stable has been the subject of contentious debate,
being challenged by those who argue that party identification is changeable (Abramson,
1979; Allsop and Weisberg, 1988; Beck, 1974; Brady, 1978; Brody and Rothenberg, 1988;
Erikson et al. 1998; Franklin and Jackson, 1983; Lockerbie, 1989; Mackuen et al. 1989;
Page and Jones, 1979), studies generally agree that American party identification is
changeable in terms of its strength rather than its partisan label. As a result, in the United
States, party identification influences the political choices of voters rather than the other
way around (Goren, 2005; Cowden and McDermott, 2000). Similar observations that party
identification is an important determinant of political choice have been reported in other
countries, such as the region of Palestine (Abu Sada, 1998) and Russia (Miller and
Klobucar, 2000).
3
Party identification, however, is not always at a uniform level, and its role can be
different across countries. For example, studies of party identification in Australia, Canada,
France, and the Netherlands, in which party identification is less stable than in the United
States, show that voters’ attitudes toward the political parties and the role of party
identification are different from those in the United States (Bélanger et al., 2006; Leduc,
1981; Schickler and Green, 1997; Stewart and Clarke, 1998; Thomassen, 1976; Wattenberg,
1982).
These studies of the partisan influence hypothesis do not consider that an exogenous
factor can influence party identification. For example, in Germany, social and religious
cleavages have developed a multi-party system and voters’ partisan alignments evolved out
of these deep social cleavages (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967). In Italy, strong family and
community ties have significantly influenced party identification (Barnes, 1977; Sani,
1976). In South Korea, party identification has strongly reflected regional divisions,
especially between the southeastern and southwestern regions (Kim and Koh, 1972; Lee,
1998).
When an exogenous factor influences party identification, the stability of party
identification may not be the necessary condition for party identification to be a cause of
electoral choice. The label of a political party with which voters identify will change, if a
new political party replaces an old political party, but the characteristics of party
identification in terms of the exogenous factor will remain identical. When consistency
exits between old and new political parties in terms of an exogenous factor, unstable party
identification can be characteristically identical to stable party identification. If so, even
4
when political party system and resultant party identification continually change, voters can
depend on their new party identification as a cost-saving mechanism for their voting
decisions.
This article is not concerned about the possibility that party identification and electoral
choice tend to go hand in hand under the influence of an exogenous factor and the observed
relationship between party identification and electoral choice is not real. Even when an
exogenous factor significantly influences both party identification and electoral choice,
party identification can play an important role in explaining electoral choice. When voters
consider an exogenous factor important in making voting decisions, voters may need to
spend their resources to figure out which candidate they need to support in terms of the
exogenous factor. Thus, as Downs (1957) explains, rational voters, trying to minimize the
amount of resources they have to spend to gain the required information, may depend on
their identification with a political party, which they think represents best their preferences
regarding the exogenous factor, as a cost-saving mechanism.
Party Identification and Electoral Choice in South Korea
In South Korea, the political party system and the resultant party identification have
continually changed. Under the leadership of political leaders who competed against each
other for the party hegemony or for the presidential nomination, often with different
regional bases, political parties have been continually formed, split, merged, or replaced
with new ones, with none lasting for more than 20 years. Leading opposition parties have
included the New Democratic Party, the Democratic Korean Party, the United New
5
Democratic Party (UNDP), and the Democratic Party, to name a few. Incumbent parties
have included the Democratic Republican Party, the Democratic Justice Party, the New
Millennium Democratic Party, the Uri Party, and the Grand National Party (GNP). This
instability of the political party system persisted through the 2012 presidential election, as
the list of political parties nominating presidential candidates continually changed.
Although the Korean political party system and resulting party identification have been
unstable, electoral choices have been strongly related to party identification (Lee 2011,
103-9). With regard to these phenomena, this article focuses on the role of an exogenous
factor, regionalism, that predisposes voters to favor one political party over others and that
helps voters to be responsible in identifying with newly emerged political parties.
In South Korea, regionalism was emerged as a key factor in explaining party
identification and electoral choice through political experiences, especially because of the
political conflict between the incumbent party and the opposition party. In the 1971
presidential election, the authoritarian regime allegedly began adopting policies favorable
to the southeastern region, especially the northern part of the southeastern region in which
the president’s hometown was located and adopting discriminative policies against the
southwestern region, which had strongly supported the presidential candidate of the leading
opposition party, the New Democratic Party, in the 1971 election. The authoritarian
regimes in the 1980s instigated policies that sparked the regional emotion of voters.
Consequently, party identification and electoral choice have strongly reflected regional
divisions, especially between the southeastern and southwestern regions (Kim and Koh,
1972; Lee, 1998). For example, when the direct presidential election was revived in 1987,
6
voters whose hometown was located in the southwestern region predominantly supported
the Party for Peace and Democracy (about 81%), whose presidential candidate was from
the southwestern region. Voters whose hometown was located in the southeastern region
were divided between the incumbent Democratic Justice Party (about 57%) and the Party
for Unification and Democracy (about 37%), whose presidential candidates were both from
the southeastern region.
Since the 1980s, political leaders from the mid-west region formed political parties but
these parties were smaller than the two major political parties whose regional bases were
the southeast and southwest region, respectively. In presidential elections, voters whose
hometown is located in other regions, such as Seoul, the mid-west region and the northern
region, tended to be divided between the two major political parties according to their
personal feelings toward the southeast and the southwest (Lee and Park, 2011).
This regionalism lasted even after democratization in the 1990s and through to the 2012
presidential election (see Cho, 1998; Choi, 2001; Choi, 2008; Hwang, 2008; Lee, 1998; Lee,
2008; Lee and Park, 2011; Kang, 2003; Kim, 2010). In the 2012 presidential election, about
69 percent of voters in the southeast supported the political party whose regional base is the
southeast, while about 89 percent of voters in the southwest supported the political party
whose regional base is the southwest. Competitions between these two political parties in
most other regions were close with vote percentage differences less than about four.
The emergence of regionalism as a key factor in explaining party identification in
Korea can also be understood in terms of the rational reaction of voters to the frequent
changes of the political party system. With the political party system that continually
7
changes, rational Korean voters need to develop their own standards, such as via the fact
that their hometown is located in the regional base of a political party, for their party
identifications.
In sum, Korean voters tended to maintain their favorable emotion towards a specific
region and towards a political party based on this region rather than their long-term
identification with a specific political party. Thus, when a regionally dominant political
party was dissolved and a new one emerged as a dominant party in one region, voters
whose hometown is located in the region and voters who have favorable attitudes towards
the region tended to support the new party and its candidate.
This behavior is different from that in other democracies such as the Netherlands,
Hungary and Poland, in which a new political party’s choice about where to place itself in
relation to existing political parties and what to emphasize can determine its electoral
success or failure (Tavits, 2008). In some western democracies, voters’ partisan support is
also divided along regional lines, but such divisions are accounted for not by regional
sentiments but by ethnic, cultural, economic, and ideological differences across regions
(Black and Black 2007; Keating 2004).
The Korean case suggests the possibility that consistency exists in party identification,
even when the political parties with which voters identify continually change, if an
exogenous factor, such as regionalism in Korea, predisposes voters to favor one political
party over others. Accordingly, voters can rely on their party identification as a cost-saving
mechanism for their voting decisions.
8
Data and Method
This article selects the 2007 Korean presidential election, for which a major survey data
is available. The 2007 Korean presidential election is a typical Korean presidential election
with which we can test whether unstable party identification can influence electoral choice.
Immediately before the 2007 presidential election, Korean political party system
experienced a major change with the replacement of one of the two major political parties,
the Uri Party, with a new party, the UNDP. Immediately after the 2007 presidential election,
the UNDP merged with the Democratic Party to form the United Democratic Party. The
other major political party, the GNP, was less than ten year old. It was previously the
Democratic Justice Party, which became the Democratic Liberal Party in 1993 with the
merger of other parties. It was renamed as the New Korea Party in 1995, and finally
became the Grand National Party in November 1997 following its merger with several
smaller conservative parties. Immediately after the 2007 presidential election, the Liberty
Forward Party split off from the GNP. As such, the 2007 presidential election was held
with the unstable political party system and resulting unstable party identification.
The data comes from the South Korean Presidential Election Panel Study: Six Waves,
2007, which was compiled by the East Asia Institute, the JoongAngllbo, the Seoul
Broadcasting System, and the Hankook Research Company and distributed by the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research. The survey was conducted from
April to December of 2007 in six waves.
First, to check whether unstable party identification well explains electoral choice, this
article employs an ordinary least squares regression analysis with Electoral Choice as the
9
dependent variable. Electoral Choice was coded as -1 (Myung-bak Lee, the presidential
candidate of the GNP), 0 (others), and 1 (Dong-young Chung, the presidential candidate of
the UNDP).
The independent variables include Party Identification, Hometown, Evaluation of Roh,
Prospective Candidate Evaluation, Retrospective Personal Economy, Retrospective
National Economy, Prospective National Economy, and Ideology. Party Identification
assigns 1 to voters who identified with the UNDP, the major party that succeeded the
incumbent Uri Party, -1 to voters who identified with the GNP, the winner of the 2007
presidential election, and 0 to independents and voters who identified with other minor
parties. Voters who identified with minor parties were grouped together with the
independents to keep Party Identification above an ordinal level of measurement. This
coding structure is also plausible for the research purpose of this article in that the minor
parties did not have a clear regional base in the 2007 presidential election. Hometown
measures the region in which a respondent’s hometown is located, not in which a
respondent is currently living. This variable was coded as 1 (Southwest), 0 (other regions),
and -1 (Southeast). It was included to check whether regionalism significantly influences
party identification and electoral choice and whether party identification significantly
influences electoral choice after regionalism is controlled out.
Retrospective and prospective evaluations of presidential candidates and economic
conditions were included to consider the egocentric and socio-tropic political behavior
(Fiorina, 1982; Kinder and Kiewiet, 1984; Lockerbie, 2002).1 Evaluation of Roh was
measured by asking, “In your opinion, how is President Roh doing in terms of governing
10
the country?” This variable was coded as 2 (very well), 1 (somewhat well), -1 (somewhat
badly), and -2 (very badly). Prospective Candidate Evaluation was measured by asking,
“Which candidate do you think will solve the most salient issue best?” It was coded as -1
(Myung-bak Lee), 0 (others), and 1 (Dong-young Chung). Retrospective Personal Economy
and Retrospective National Economy were measured by asking how a respondent’s
family’s financial situation has changed in the last five years and how a respondent thinks
the country’s economy has changed in the last five years, respectively. These variables
were coded as 2 (very much improved), 1 (somewhat improved), 0 (not much changed), -1
(somewhat worsened), and -2 (very much worsened). Prospective National Economy was
measured by asking, compared to the present, how a respondent thinks the country’s
economy will change in the next five years. This variable was coded as 2 (will very much
improve), 1 (will somewhat improve), 0 (will not change much), -1 (will somewhat worsen),
and -2 (will very much worsen).
Ideology was measured by asking, “On a scale of 0 to 10 where 0 represents ‘very
liberal’, 5 represents ‘moderate’, and 10 represents ‘very conservative’, where would you
place yourself?” It was included to control for the possibility that voters make their voting
decisions according to their ideological predispositions.
To check whether consistency exists in unstable party identification, this article employs
an ordinary least squares regression analysis with party identification, which was measured
at the sixth wave, as the dependent variable. If consistency exists between old and new
party identifications, voters should be able to hold the new political party responsible for
what the old political party did. Therefore, voters can base their new party identification on
11
factors that have been employed to explain stable party identification, such as candidate
evaluations and economic conditions (Abramson, 1979; Beck, 1974; Brady, 1978; Brody
and Rothenberg, 1988; Erikson et al., 1998; Fiorina, 1981; Franklin and Jackson, 1983;
Lockerbie, 1989; Mackuen et al., 1989; Page and Jones, 1979). The dependent variable is
Party Identification, which assigns 1 to voters who identified with the UNDP, -1 to voters
who identified with the GNP, and 0 to independents and voters who identified with other
minor parties.
The independent variables include Past Party Identification in addition to those of the
above regression analysis. As discussed above, the significant coefficients of evaluation
variables can be evidence the consistency of party identification: voters tended to hold the
new political party responsible for what the old political party did.
Past Party Identification was included to control for the continuity of party
identification. The Uri Party was a major party until the second wave, when a majority of
its representatives left it to form a new party, the UNDP. For the first wave, the Uri Party
was given to respondents as a choice. For the second wave, both the UNDP and the Uri
Party were given to respondents as choices. From the third wave, the UNDP was given as a
choice, whereas the Uri Party was not. Thus, for Past Party Identification, party
identification measured at the third wave was used. For this variable, an instrumental
variable was used to control for possible autocorrelation between past and present party
identification (see Fiorina, 1982; Lockerbie, 1989, 2002; Markus and Converse, 1979; Shin,
2012). This instrumental variable based on the assumption of autocorrelation in the
disturbances is appropriate, given the short two-month lag between the third wave and the
12
sixth wave. Briefly, party identification at the third wave was regressed on the selected
demographic factors of age; gender, which assigns 0 to males and 1 to females; level of
education; level of family income; and city size. It was shown that as voters become older,
more affluent, and more highly educated, they tended to be supporters of the GNP, as
compared to the UNDP (see Kim and Yoo, 1997; Park et al., 2008). In addition, compared
to male voters and those who were living in large cities, female voters and those who were
living in rural areas tended to be supporters of the GNP (see Kim and Koh, 1972; Park et al.,
2008). The estimated equation is as follows:
Past Party Identification = –.022 – .08×Age – .05×Gender – .03×Education Level
– .001×Family Income + .09×City Size
This equation is significant at p = .000. This article used the predicted values as Past Party
Identification (see Shin 2012).
In the above ordinary least squares regression analysis with which we check whether
consistency exists in unstable party identification, the significant coefficient of Hometown
can be evidence for regionalism’s contribution to the consistency of unstable party
identification: voters tended to support the political parties that were regionally based on
voters’ hometown. To check more directly whether regionalism contributes to the
consistency of unstable party identification after various evaluations and ideological
predisposition are controlled out, this article employs two logistic regression analyses, each
of which includes voters who supported, at the first wave, the Uri Party or the GNP,
13
respectively. The dependent variable measures whether or not voters continually supported
the political party at the first and sixth waves, between which Korean political party system
experienced a major change with the replacement of one of the two major political parties
with a new political party in 2007. The dependent variable of the first analysis assigns 1 to
voters who supported the Uri Party (the first wave) and the UNDP (the sixth wave) and 0 to
voters who switched from the Uri Party to others. The dependent variable of the second
analysis assigns 1 to voters who continuously supported the GNP at the first and sixth
waves and 0 to voters who switched from the GNP to others. The independent variables are
the same as those of the above ordinary least squares regression analysis, except that Past
Party Identification, which is not appropriate as an independent variable, is not included in
the model.
Results
As expected, in the 2007 presidential election, the distribution of the supporters of the
two major political parties shows a clear regional disparity (see Table 1). For the voters
who identified with the GNP, the ratio between those whose hometown is located in the
southwest and those whose hometown is located in the southeast is about 1 to 9, while it is
about 4.3 to 1 for the UNDP supporters. For independents and those who identified with
minor parties, the ratio is 1.1 to 1.
[Table 1 about here]
In addition, electoral choice in the 2007 presidential election was clearly divided
between voters whose hometown is located in the southeast and voters whose hometown is
14
located in the southwest. The ratio between the supporters of the GNP’s presidential
candidate and the supporters of the UNDP’s presidential candidate is about 6 to 1 among
voters whose hometown is located in the southeast, while it is about 1 to 9 among those
whose hometown is located in the southwest (Table 2). Among voters whose hometown is
located in the other regions, the ratio is about 2.1 to 1, indicating that voters, except those
whose hometown is located in the southwestern region, tended to be more supportive of the
GNP’s presidential candidate, the winner of the 2007 presidential election.
[Table 2 about here]
However, regionalism is not the only factor that effectively explains electoral choice.
Party identification strongly influenced electoral choice in the 2007 presidential election,
even after Hometown and evaluation variables were controlled out (Table 3). According to
the standardized coefficients, party identification was the most important factor in
explaining electoral choice in the 2007 Korean presidential election. In the 2007 Korean
presidential election, the political party system changed and voters voted for political
parties that were different from the one they confronted in the previous presidential election
and during the Roh administration. Party identification, however, tended to predispose
voters to support a particular political party’s candidate.
[Table 3 about here]
Given that the political party system was unstable, experiencing a major change
immediately before and after the presidential election, the effect of party identification is
observed when the partisan influence hypothesis’ basic assumption that party identification
should be stable is not supported. As discussed above, a possible explanation of this
15
contradictory observation is that party identification is characteristically stable in terms of
the exogenous factor of regionalism.
Table 4 supports the argument that consistency exists in unstable party identification in
Korea. According to the coefficient of Evaluation of Roh in the second column, evaluation
of the incumbent president’s job performance significantly explains voters’ present party
identification, despite that the president’s political party, the Uri Party, was replaced with a
new one, the UNDP. The significant coefficient of Evaluation of Roh indicates that voters
tended to hold the UNDP responsible for what the old incumbent party has done.
According to Column 3, when only the voters whose hometown is located in the
southeast and southwest regions are included in the analysis, Evaluation of Roh’s relative
importance decreases as the relative importance of Hometown increases. Evaluation of Roh,
however, remains statistically significant, indicating that even those whose hometown is
located in these regions tend to base their party identification not only on regional
sentiment but also on their evaluation of what has been done by the old incumbent party.
Hometown, with which we measure regionalism, is a status variable whose values do
not change across time. Therefore, its significant coefficient can also evidence for the
consistency of party identification: both old and new party identifications are formed under
the influence of regionalism. According to the standardized coefficients, Hometown’s
influence over party identification is greater than any other evaluation variables except
Prospective Candidate Evaluation. According to the adjusted R2 of the first and second
columns, Hometown increases the explanatory power of the model by about 27 percent.2
16
As expected, regionalism explains better the present party identification of voters whose
hometown is located in the southeast and southwest regions. According to the standardized
coefficients of the second and third columns, Hometown’s relative importance in
explaining party identification increases when the analysis includes only those whose
hometown is located in the southeast and southwest regions. According to the adjusted R2
of the second and third columns, the explanatory power of the model also increases by
about 20 percent in the third column.
[Table 4 about here]
According the coefficients of Hometown in Table 5, regionalism contributed to the
consistency in voters’ old and new party identifications at the first and sixth waves. In the
first column, when all independent variables except Hometown were held constant at their
means, the probability that voters who supported the Uri Party at the first wave would
support the UNDP at the sixth wave was higher by .448 for those whose hometown is
located in the southwest than for those whose hometown is located in the southeast. In the
second column, when all independent variables except Hometown were held constant at
their means, the probability that voters who supported the GNP at the first wave would
support the GNP at the sixth wave was higher by .226 for those whose hometown is located
in the southeast than for those whose hometown is located in the southwest.
In the first column, Evaluation of Roh is significant, indicating that supporters of the
old political party, the Uri party, tended to continually support the new political party, the
UNDP, depending on their evaluation of the incumbent president of the old political party.
[Table 5 about here]
17
Conclusion
As observed in the recent history of political parties, the political party system is not
stable in Korea. An old political party is frequently replaced with a new party, which causes
a change in voters’ party identification. Voters’ electoral choices, however, are highly
predictable in terms of their party identification because consistency exists between old and
new party identifications. Regionalism contributes to the consistency of old and new party
identifications, making voters continuously support the newly dominant party in the region
in which their hometown is located or toward which they have favorable attitudes. In this
respect, regionalism stabilizes voters’ identification with frequently changing political
parties and makes the ostensibly unstable party identification characteristically stable to
serve as a cost-saving mechanism for electoral choice.
This observation is in contrast with studies of the partisan influence hypothesis in many
western democracies, which have focused on the instability of party identification as
evidence against the hypothesis. This article shows that unstable party identification can
explain electoral choice, if an exogenous factor that predisposed voters to favor the old
political party over others continues to predispose voters to favor the new political party
over others. Future studies of the partisan influence hypothesis should consider the
possibility that ostensibly unstable party identification is characteristically identical to
stable party identification in some democracies.
18
Notes
1. Prospective personal economy is not available in the survey.
2. The cure of an instrumental variable may be worse than the disease. Accordingly,
this article also ran the equation with actual past party identification instead of the
instrumental variable version. In this equation, Hometown’s coefficient reduces and the
coefficient of Past Party Identification increases. Although regionalism strongly influences
current party identification, Past Party Identification is the most powerful independent
variable, followed by Prospective Candidate Evaluation and Hometown.
We need to take these results with reservation in that Past Party Identification in this
analysis is measured just two months earlier than the dependent variable. A lack of
autocorrelation in the disturbances is not warranted, given the short time lag between waves.
In some sense, it is noticeable that current party identification is significantly explained by
regionalism even when the influence of actual party identification measured two months
earlier is controlled out.
19
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25
Table 1. Party Identification in Different Regions1
_________________________________________________________________________
Southwest
Southeast
Others
N
_________________________________________________________________________
GNP
5.0
45.3
49.7
1035
Independent/Others
25.4
23.7
50.9
780
UNDP
53.3
12.4
34.4
291
Total
19.2
32.8
48.0
2106
_________________________________________________________________________
Sourec: East Asia Institute et al. (2007).
1. The southwest includes Jeonnam, Jeonbuk, and Gwangju. The southesast includes
Gyeongnam, Gyeongbuk, Busan, Daegu, and Ulsan. Others include Chungnam, Chungbuk,
Daejeon, Gyeonggi, Incheon and Jeju. These regions are the places in which respondents’
hometown is located, not in which respondents are currently living.
26
Table 2. Vote Choices in Different Regions in the Seventeenth Presidential Election1
_________________________________________________________________________
GNP
UNDP
Others
GNP : UNDP
_________________________________________________________________________
Southeast
61.8
10.4
27.8
5.9 : 1
Southwest
9.0
80.0
11.0
1 : 8.9
Others
Chungcheong
Gyeonggi
Gangwon
Seoul
49.6
37.4
50.6
52.0
53.2
23.7
22.8
23.7
18.9
24.5
26.7
39.8
25.8
29.1
22.3
2.1 : 1
1.6 : 1
2.1 : 1
2.8 : 1
2.2 : 1
Total
48.7
26.1
25.2
1.9 : 1
_________________________________________________________________________
Source: http://www.nec.go.kr
1. The southwest includes Jeonnam, Jeonbuk, and Gwangju. The southesast includes
Gyeongnam, Gyeongbuk, Busan, Daegu, and Ulsan. Chungcheong includes Chungnam,
Chungbuk, and Daejeon. Gyeonggi includes Gyeonggi and Incheon. These regions are the
places in which respondents’ hometown is located, not in which respondents are currently
living.
27
Table 3. Factors Explaining Vote Choices in the 2007 Korean Presidential Election
_________________________________________________________________________
Coefficient
Standardized Coefficient
_________________________________________________________________________
Evaluation of Roh
.027 (.012)*
.04
Prospective Candidate Evaluation
.353 (.02)***
.32
Prospective National Economy
.02 (.015)
.021
Retrospective Personal Economy
.008 (.017)
.007
Retrospective National Economy
.029 (.017) †
.032
Hometown
.149 (.018)***
.136
Ideology
-.019 (.006)**
-.047
Party Identification1
.418 (.022)***
.382
Constant
.149 (.036)***
N
2082
Adjusted R2
.507
_________________________________________________________________________
1. Party Identification was from the fifth wave of the survey.
* P < .05, ** P < .01, *** P < .001 (two-tailed), † P < .05 (one-tailed).
28
Table 4. Factors Explaining Party Identification in South Korea
_________________________________________________________________________
Column 1
Column 2
Column 31
_________________________________________________________________________
Evaluation of Roh
.099 (.014, .159)***2
.088 (.013, .141)***
.054 (.017, .083)**
Prospective Candidate Evaluation
.40 (.02, .392)***
.344 (.019, .337)***
.316 (.025, .308)***
Prospective National Economy
.039 (.017, .043)*
.042 (.016, .046)**
.046 (.021, .049)*
Retrospective Personal Economy
.008 (.019, .009)
.002 (.018, .003)
.011 (.024, .011)
Retrospective National Economy
.032 (.018, .039) †
.035 (.017, .042)*
.026 (.023, .03)
.304 (.018, .302)***
.339 (.018, .435)***
Hometown
Ideology
-.061 (.007, -.168)***
-.054 (.007, -.15)*** -.053 (.009, -.139)***
Past Party Identification
.351 (.119, .057)**
.344 (.111, .056)**
.221 (.154, .033)
Constant
.347 (.052)***
.323 (.048)***
.317 (.068)***
N
1992
1992
1029
Adjusted R2
.322
.408
.49
_________________________________________________________________________
1. Only the southeast and southwest regions were included in the analysis.
2. The first numbers in parentheses are standard errors and the second numbers in
parentheses are standardized coefficients.
* P < .05, ** P < .01, *** P < .001 (two-tailed), † P < .05 (one-tailed).
29
Table 5. Factors Explaining the Consistency of Party Identification when Political Party
System Experienced a Major Change
_________________________________________________________________________
1st Wave
The Uri Party
The GNP
6th Wave
The UNDP
The GNP
_________________________________________________________________________
Evaluation of Roh
-.241 (.114)*1
-.142 (.087)
Prospective Candidate Evaluation
.923 (.158)***
-.967 (.125)***
Prospective National Economy
-.047 (.158)
-.207 (.101)*
Retrospective Personal Economy
-.169 (.171)
-.019 (.112)
Retrospective National Economy
.338 (.172)*
.147 (.112)
Hometown
.966 (.162)***
-.465 (.131)***
Ideology
-.093 (.063)
.134 (.042)**
Constant
.923 (.158)***
-.967 (.125)***
N
422
1204
% Correctly Classified
71.8
82.3
Nagelkerke R2
.268
.136
_________________________________________________________________________
1. The numbers in parentheses are standard errors.
* P < .05, ** P < .01, *** P < .001 (two-tailed), † P < .05 (one-tailed).
30