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A Study of the Influence of the Sewol Ferry Accident on the Voting Behavior of the Electorate in the 2014 Seoul Mayoral Election

Kim, Hak-Ryang 1

1국민대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This study analyzes the influence of the Sewol Ferry accident, which occurred 52 days before the Seoul mayoral election on June 4, 2014, on the behavior of Seoul voters. There are two reasons for this study. First, previous studies have not adequately examined the influence of issues on voting behavior in Korea. Second, the Sewol Ferry accident was one of the most influential and prominent issues on voting behavior in the past 20 years. For this study, we conducted a telephone survey of Seoul voters after election day. The total sample of the survey was 970, which was proportionally extracted by gender, age, and region. The main findings of this study are that only 16.9% of Seoul voters voted based on the Sewol Ferry accident, although the accident was a dominant issue, and that the accident had little effect on variations in voters’ support for a candidate in the Seoul mayoral election. We obtain these findings when we control for two traditionally crucial variables, party identification and the personality and pledges of candidates. In the meantime, 75.6% of respondents estimated that the Sewol Ferry accident influenced the voting behavior of the electorate. More than three-fifths (61.8%) of the respondents answered that the accident was beneficial to the candidate Wonsoon Park, while only 3.2% said that the accident might be beneficial to the candidate Mongjun Jeong. The results show how voters’ unscientific estimate of the effect of the Sewol Ferry accident on voting behavior differs from that when party identification and the personality/pledge of candidates are controlled for.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.