• Asian Journal for Public Opinion Research
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.304-326
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• 2023

News shows often deliver crosscutting information to their audiences by inviting commentators from rival political parties. If these news shows foster the formation of informed and balanced views of the audience, mass media could provide countermeasures against political polarization. To test the effect of such news shows, this study conducted an experiment with two variants of a simulated radio talk show. In the partisan scenario, the two guest commentators' affiliations suggested their ideological orientation. In the non-partisan scenario, the commentators had neutral affiliations. We divided participants into two ideology groups, liberals and conservative, and compared each group's evaluation of the commentators in the two scenarios. Two multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) tests were conducted to analyze the effect of the perceived ideology of the commentators on respondents' attitudes toward the commentators' arguments depending on their own ideological inclinations. The analyses results did not support the hypothesis that anticipated partisan attitudes towards the commentators' arguments. It was only the liberal respondents who showed statistically significant different attitudes toward commentators' arguments in each of the two scenarios. The findings suggest that such broadcast shows do not automatically trigger partisan message processing and may help the audience to develop informed and balanced opinions. While the current study failed to find conclusive evidence to support the hypotheses, it also found that the perceived ideology of the information source may trigger partisan attitudes for certain types of issues. Future studies with different experiment designs are needed to investigate the issue further.

• Korean Journal of Legislative Studies
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.67-99
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• 2018

This study analyzes the revision bills of the National Assembly Law in the 19th National Assembly in which the National Assembly Advancement Act was enacted, with the question "who are involved in the revision of the procedural rules, and what motivates them?" The cosponsor network analysis focusing on primary sponsors of the revision bills shows that the network was constructed by party affiliations. A small number of members with high degree centrality attempted to cooperate with each other at the cosponsoring stage, but the legislation did not pass through the related committee. In addition, this study tests the four competitive hypotheses (the committee hypothesis, the distributive politics hypothesis, the ideological distance hypothesis, and the partisan affiliation hypothesis) about the motivation to propose amendments by using the regression models which include newly measured variables. Only the committee hypothesis and the partisan affiliation hypothesis are empirically supported. This implies that partisan consideration is still significant in amending the National Assembly Law even after the National Assembly Advancement Act, and thus party leaders' willingness to seek bipartisan compromises is at the heart of problem-solving.

• Korean Journal of Legislative Studies
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.45-78
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• 2019

This study examines the relationship between individuals' perceptions on party conflict and affective polarization. It pays particular attention to party identification as a moderating variable. Using a survey conducted in the context of the 2014 Korean local election, the present study hypothesizes that perceiving serious inter-party conflict in the political arena is likely to increase negative feelings toward out-group political party among partisans only. Not only do the results confirm our hypothesis but suggest that conflict perception leads to affective polarization among partisan voters. This paper contributes to our understanding of the mechanism that links the attribution of blame to out-group political party for legislative gridlock with ever-growing affective polarization of the electorate.

• Korean Journal of Legislative Studies
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.203-239
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• 2018

Responsible government can be achieved when social cleavages are institutionalized via political competition and social interests are represented by responsible parties. This paper aims to investigate the factors that determine welfare expenditures in Korean local governments by analyzing partisanship and political competition factors simultaneously in the same model. This paper also argues that the relationship between the political factors and welfare expenditures in local governments is not linearly increasing as the previous studies claim. This paper examines the welfare expenditures in Korean municipality-level local governments in 2007, 2011, and 2015. The primary findings are: 1) the partisanship of the head of local government and the party distribution of local assembly members have meaningful effect on the welfare expenditures and the divided governments do not show significantly different effect on welfare expenditures from unified governments, which is contrary to the extant studies, 2) the partisan effects of the head and the local assembly vary according to the levels of municipalities (Gu, Gun, and city), mainly due to the difference in types of revenues and expenditures and 3) the relationship between seats shares of progressive parties in local assembly and the welfare expenditure is not linearly increasing one. The effect of seats shares of progressive parties dramatically begins to increase when the seats shares are in 40%-60%. With these findings, this paper highlights the conservative nature of head of local governments with Hannara party (or Saenuri Party), the conservative leaning of independent candidates, and the conservative orientation of local assemblies in the regions dominated by Democratic Party (and its equivalents).