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Personalize Campaign or Voting? : Electoral Personalization in South Korean General Elections
Youn, Leeann H.
Youn, Leeann H.
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Abstract
This dissertation is about the electoral behaviors of candidates and voters in South Korean General Elections with the wish to suggest a generalizable concept and theory of electoral personalization. Electoral personalization occurs when political actors (i.e., candidates and voters) rely on candidate-related factors instead of party-related factors as they campaign or vote.In this dissertation, I attempt to theorize how electoral personalization progresses. Despite the importance and frequent usage of the concept, scholars still need to achieve a precise and unified definition of personalization. Hence, in Chapter 2, I conceptualized personalization concerning electoral behavior, such as candidates’ campaign personalization and voters’ voting personalization. To do so, I created a typology of electoral personalization with two conceptual dimensions – candidate individuality vs. party collectivity and district localization vs. country nationalization. The former dimension categorizes electoral behaviors in terms of candidate-centered vs. party-centered, which resembles the categorization of the previous campaign studies. The latter dimension categorizes electoral behaviors in regard to policy orientation, which has often been neglected. Based on this categorization, I established four ideal types of electoral behavior that exist on a continuum between depersonalized and personalized. Thus, I consider candidates’ campaign personalization and voters’ voting personalization as a matter of degree rather than a kind.Based on the conceptualization, I generated a theoretical framework to analyze electoral behavior, including candidates’ campaign behavior and voters’ voting behavior in Chapter 3. The reason to generate a somewhat ambitious framework that covers a full election cycle is that campaigning and voting do not occur in a contextual vacuum. Also, candidates’ campaigns are not independent of voters’ voting and vice versa; these two stages are interactional. Hence, I argue that we need to analyze the connection from the political and socio-economic setting/context to the candidates’ campaign stage and from the campaign stage to the voters’ voting stage to understand under what conditions electoral personalization progresses. This theoretical framework of electoral personalization is generalizable and applicable to other countries or institutional contexts, even though I focus on the case of Korea in this dissertation.Understanding Korean electoral personalization is critical to fill the theoretical, methodological, and empirical gap in the study of personalization of politics. As one of the most-likely cases, understanding the Korean electoral personalization case is theoretically beneficial. It allows us to closely examine the scope of conditions and identify the causal necessity or sufficiency of electoral personalization. With much constituency candidate behavior data based on Korean Candidate Advertisements, I constructed an original candidate campaign behavior dataset, as explained in Chapter 4. The new datasets allow us to explore electoral personalization in Korea from the generally overlooked Asian region. By doing so, it is possible to investigate further whether we observe any differences and similarities compared to the previously examined country cases in the view of personalization of politics. Furthermore, as a new democracy, the Korean case can shed light on comparative electoral personalization between old and new democracies.From various statistical tests, this dissertation shows that country-, district-, and individual-level political and socio-economic factors influence candidates’ campaign personalization. Particularly, political factors, such as the national political scandal, party system (e.g., party’s ideological position), and incumbency, significantly impact campaign personalization, as shown in Chapter 5. Although the district-level socio-economic factors, such as the district’s urbanization, play a significant role in campaign personalization when I ran a bivariable test, the impact disappeared when it was tested with other political factors. Similarly, the influence of candidates’ socio-economic factors, such as age and education, also disappeared when they were statistically tested with other political factors.Voters’ voting personalization also progressed in Korea. Voters tend to reward candidates who personalized campaigns. Statistical tests with conditional logit models in Chapter 6 confirmed that voters prefer candidates who adopted personalized strategies, such as emphasizing the connection to the district or district specific issues/policy. Furthermore, the pattern or degree of voters’ voting personalization changes by an outbreak of a national political scandal and voters’ partisan status. Interestingly, even partisan voters personalized their voting by choosing candidates who emphasized their district specific policy/development; party-focused strategies did not attract partisan voters. I discuss the possible reason for the counterintuitive outcome in Chapter 6.All in all, this dissertation found expected and unexpected outcomes throughout the empirical analyses. The unexpected outcomes are discussed in detail in both Chapters 5 and 6. The counterintuitive outcomes suggest interesting future research, as discussed in Chapter 7. Among the future studies, the following research can be quite beneficial: comparative country studies on electoral personalization, including the case of Japan and Taiwan; studies on independents – campaign and voting personalization of independent candidates and independent voters; transferring text into data using computerized content analysis of Korean Candidate Advertisement to cover entire candidates over the six democratic elections.
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Date
2023-01-01
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University of Kansas
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Keywords
Political science, Campaign Personalization, Constituency Elections, Electoral Personalization, Korea, Personalization of Politics, Voting Personalization