• Korean Journal of Legislative Studies
• /
• v.26 no.2
• /
• pp.35-71
• /
• 2020

The purpose of this study is to verify the effect of electoral competition on voters deciding on strategic split-ticket voting under the mixed-member electoral system. As result, the more competitive the constituencies are, the more voters choose to vote for the major parties. The results of logistic regression analysis including interaction terms showed that the more competitive the constituencies are, the more voters choose for candidates from the major parties. Also, the finding shows that major party supporters are less affected by electoral competition than minor party supporters in choosing a candidate in the single-seat districts. In the case of minor party supporters, the more competitive the constituencies were, the more likely they were to choose the major party candidate instead of the minor party candidate. Based on these results, it can be inferred that voters are affected by the presence or behavior of other voters in local constituencies under the first-past-the-post rule. Because of the psychology of not wanting their votes to be useless, voters cast their ballots more strategically as the competition in constituencies intensifies, and as the competition in constituencies slackens, such tendencies weaken, and this trait is particularly evident among minor party supporters.

• Journal of Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers
• /
• v.40 no.1
• /
• pp.60-83
• /
• 2014

This paper aims to propose a research framework of analyzing voting activities of a national assembly on the basis of member-level voting similarity and provides a case study in the $18^{th}$ national assembly in South Korea. First, we propose a bill contentiousness measure that gives a higher score to bills for which ayes and noes are more diversified in both conservative and progressive parties. Based on the bill contentiousness measure, the top 5%, 10%, and 20% bills were identified and used for further analyses. Moreover, we propose a member-level voting similarity measure that compensates for the lower frequency of noes, and evaluate the pair-wise voting similarities for all lawmakers. Then, voting similarity differences to the affiliated/non-affiliated parties were analyzed for the members in the two major parties according to some internal/external key factors. Finally, similar voting groups were identified and their affiliations were investigated based on the multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) and network analysis techniques. A case study on the $18^{th}$ national assembly of South Korea showed that the cohesion of the members in the 'Hanara' party becomes higher than that of the 'Minju' party as the bill contentiousness increases, whereas the number of elected, local constituency versus proportional representation, and the competition intensity in a local constituency were found to be partially influential to the voting activities of lawmakers. In addition, MDS and network analysis showed that there is a distinctive difference between two parties when all bills are analyzed, whereas the diversity of parties increases in the same group as the bill contentiousness increases.