• Korean Journal of Legislative Studies
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.103-139
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• 2019

This study aims to verify how trust in government leads voters' electoral participation with paying attention to their political orientations. In particular, this study takes voters' partisan consideration into account to examine different direction of the effect of trust in government on electoral participation depending on their ideology and partisan preferences. Key findings show that governmental trust has a positive influence on electoral participation for voters who have conformable ideological orientations to the incumbent government and positive preferences toward the ruling party. In contrast, distrust in government is more likely to increase the possibility of electoral participation for those who have different ideology from the incumbent, negative attitude toward the ruling party, and partisan preferences of the opposition party. Previous studies on the relationship between governmental trust and electoral participation have been mixed as yet. For the sake of explaining this inconclusiveness, this study focuses on partisan foundation of voters' political decision making. It contributes to our understanding of the political properties of governmental trust and its implications for representative democracy.

• Korean journal of communication and information
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• v.44
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• pp.108-143
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• 2008

Candidate images refer to a holistic impression of a candidate which is composed of various dimensions of attributes. This study investigated how online and offline news media, campaign media such as political ads, televised debates, and candidate web-sites, and interpersonal political talk influenced voters' images of a candidate in such dimensions as personal traits, job-performance abilities, and policy capabilities, and further their political decision making in the 17th presidential election in Korea. The analysis focused on President Lee, Myung Bak who won the election by obtaining nearly 50% of the effective votes. According to the data analyses, first, uses of offline newspapers positively influenced voters' images of candidate Lee's personal traits such as his morality, integrity, trustworthiness, and compassion, yet online news uses had an opposite effect on voters' impression of his job-performance and economic policy capabilities. Secondly, among various campaign media, television ads and candidate web-sites positively contributed to the formation of candidate Lee's images, yet showed little direct effect on vote choice, indicating that campaign media mainly indirectly influenced voters' political decision making. Each of the first, second, and third televised candidate debates revealed unique effects on image formation and vote choice. Thirdly, the network size and frequency of political talk negatively influenced image formation regarding candidate Lee's personal traits and economic policy capabilities, yet the discussion network size positively contributed to the Lee votes. Forth, among various dimensions of candidate images, voters' perceptions of candidate Lee's personal traits appeared to be the most significant predictor of the support for him.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.174-186
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• 2019

Twitter is very popluar with users who desire social interaction as it is a highly effective method of communicating compared to traditional communication platforms; and thus has garnered considerable interest from the academic community. This research reveals how election results can be predicted by the factors of total volume of messages, positive messages and negative messages tweeted about a candidate. Social matrix analysis revealed that the quantity of twitter messages was a strong predictor of election results in the 18th presidential election in Korea. In addition, more positive messages than negative messages about a candidate from twitter users recorded better results in the election. This research found that the total quantity of messages, positive messages, and negative messages as key factors for predicting election result. Future studies should investigate other SNS platforms to discover what is the most effective communication strategy on each platform.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.43-61
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• 2016

Customer reviews help potential customers make purchasing decisions. However, the prevalence of reviews on websites push the customer to sift through them and change the focus from a mere search to identifying which of the available reviews are valuable and useful for the purchasing decision at hand. To identify useful reviews, websites have developed different mechanisms to give customers options when evaluating existing reviews. Websites allow users to rate the usefulness of a customer review as helpful or not. Amazon.com uses a ratio-type helpfulness, while Yelp.com uses a count-type usefulness index. This usefulness index provides helpful reviews to future potential purchasers. This study investigated the effects of sentiment and readability on useful votes for customer reviews. Similar studies on the relationship between sentiment and readability have focused on the ratio-type usefulness index utilized by websites such as Amazon.com. In this study, Yelp.com's count-type usefulness index for restaurant reviews was used to investigate the relationship between sentiment/readability and usefulness votes. Yelp.com's online customer reviews for stores in the beverage and food categories were used for the analysis. In total, 170,294 reviews containing information on a store's reputation and popularity were used. The control variables were the review length, store reputation, and popularity; the independent variables were the sentiment and readability, while the dependent variable was the number of helpful votes. The review rating is the moderating variable for the review sentiment and readability. The length is the number of characters in a review. The popularity is the number of reviews for a store, and the reputation is the general average rating of all reviews for a store. The readability of a review was calculated with the Coleman-Liau index. The sentiment is a positivity score for the review as calculated by SentiWordNet. The review rating is a preference score selected from 1 to 5 (stars) by the review author. The dependent variable (i.e., usefulness votes) used in this study is a count variable. Therefore, the Poisson regression model, which is commonly used to account for the discrete and nonnegative nature of count data, was applied in the analyses. The increase in helpful votes was assumed to follow a Poisson distribution. Because the Poisson model assumes an equal mean and variance and the data were over-dispersed, a negative binomial distribution model that allows for over-dispersion of the count variable was used for the estimation. Zero-inflated negative binomial regression was used to model count variables with excessive zeros and over-dispersed count outcome variables. With this model, the excess zeros were assumed to be generated through a separate process from the count values and therefore should be modeled as independently as possible. The results showed that positive sentiment had a negative effect on gaining useful votes for positive reviews but no significant effect on negative reviews. Poor readability had a negative effect on gaining useful votes and was not moderated by the review star ratings. These findings yield considerable managerial implications. The results are helpful for online websites when analyzing their review guidelines and identifying useful reviews for their business. Based on this study, positive reviews are not necessarily helpful; therefore, restaurants should consider which type of positive review is helpful for their business. Second, this study is beneficial for businesses and website designers in creating review mechanisms to know which type of reviews to highlight on their websites and which type of reviews can be beneficial to the business. Moreover, this study highlights the review systems employed by websites to allow their customers to post rating reviews.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.17 no.8
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• pp.80-89
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• 2017

Television viewing affects viewers' attitudes and opinions on their political issues. Since the beginning of General Programming TV services in 2011, they are criticized of their politically biased programming. In order to investigate the effect of General Programming TV on voters' behavior, we analyzed whether or not there is a change in the voting behavior of the conservative parties among the areas with high and low TV ratings of general programming TV. Based on the result of 18th presidential election in December 2012, we could not find any difference in voting behavior on the Saenuri party among the areas with high and low ratings of general programming TV channels. However, in the 6th provincial election in June 2014, while the voting shares of the Saenuri party were higher in the areas with high ratings of TV Chosun, Channel A, and JTBC than in those areas with low ratings.

• Korean Journal of Legislative Studies
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.145-176
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• 2009

This paper introduces two concepts, specialization and representation, to evaluate activities of standing committees in Korean Assembly. Previous studies have criticized the committees based on frequent change of committee membership. After analyzing the empirical data of Finance and Economy Committee, it turns out that different from the previous arguments, the committee reaches the high level of activities in the perspective of specialization and representation. Changing of committee membership, after considering direction of the change and period of leaving the committee, is less happened than they are supposed. If voting by proxy or absentee voting were allowed, the frequency of the changing membership would be decreased. Study on Finance and Economy committee reveals that the extent of participation of the committee members is similar to the that of the floor meeting and that the number of participants and hours for each meeting display the characteristics of deliberative democracy of committee. Unanimous decisions outnumber majority ones. Therefore, this paper insists that standing committees in Korean Assembly works much better than what they have been criticized

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.105-118
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• 2021

This study pays attention to the fact that the fake news is attracting attention because it causes various social problems. To find out these fake news' influence, the study conducted the experiment to examine that the fake news related to the electronic voting system affects on the news users' attitude of using the system, intention to participate in the election through the system and reliability of news services. The results have shown that the fake news framed with negative contents reduced users' attitude of using the system and intention of participation in the election. Especially, as a result of examining the difference in the fake news' influence according to each news services, in the case that users recognized that the news was fake after exposing to the general internet news, the attitude of using the system and the intention of participation in the election have reduced and recovered again. However, users who exposed to Naver, Facebook believed the negative content of the fake news more strongly. Through these results, this study empirically confirmed that the fake news has a tendency to exert influence on users' cognitive dimension and to reinforce awareness in a direction consistent with the initial exposure information.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.12 no.8
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• pp.157-166
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• 2012

At the recent 19th General Election, Korean papers waged a surrogate war for the parties they share ideology with. All the conventional practices remained the same - the horse race-like presentations, furthering of confrontations, disregarding policy issues, allocating larger space for commentaries and negative issues, and etc. On top of these, papers began to focus on generational conflicts and individuals at the center of widespread attention and controversies, as a new trend. Photo images are largely used in the commentaries and articles dealing with confrontational or controversial situations. Of course, while the visual images seem to reinforce the emotional appeal of the messages papers try to get across, the potential problems need be noticed that could rise when irrelevant images are used.

• Korean Journal of Legislative Studies
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.135-170
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• 2018

The recent success of populist parties and candidates in the US and European countries leads to a massive amount of empirical research on populism, a deviant form of representative democracy. Much ink has been spilled to define populism and to identify the causes of its rise and continued success in democratic political system. However, little is known about populist attitudes of individual voters. Using a large-scale online survey fielded in the context of the South Korean presidential election in 2017, this study examines (1) what determines populist attitudes of South Korean voters and (2) how populist attitudes are associated with evaluations of political parties, candidates, and political issues. Statistical analysis reveals that people high on populism are more likely to support an underdog left-wing political party and its presidential candidate, and are less likely to support policies implemented or proposed under the auspices of the Park Geun-hye administration. These findings do not necessarily suggest the inherent affinity between populism and left-wing ideology; rather, it implies populist attitudes happened to appear in 2017, in reactions to lack of confidence in the previous government.

• Journal of the Korean Data and Information Science Society
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.379-390
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• 2013

Through the survey of the K university students' perception on participation in elections, we want to find ways to induce a sound political participation and to effectively be able to boost voter turnout. We analyze the relations among image on election, interest in election and will of participation via structural equation model. We found that both image on election and interest in election significantly influence on will of participation in election. Using the last election participation as a moderating variable, we found that image on election has more effects on will of participation for the participants but not for the case of interest in election.