• Korean System Dynamics Review
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.47-66
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• 2011

South Korea has achieved remarkable social and economic development together with the process of democratization over the past 20 years. In the democratic process in South Korea, ordinary people have actively participated in conventional political activities such as elections. But recently, one of the salient phenomena is that the public have been showing political apathy associated with a light poll. Especially, the most serious concern in the political environment of South Korea is that young voters (e.g., 20-30s) have serious political apathy leading to low voter turnout. Regarding this concern, many political scientists argued that this political phenomenon is not only the case in South Korea, insisting that many consolidated democratic countries such as European countries and the US have the same problems. However, South Korea has contained different factors (e.g., historical, culture, social, and political differences) leading to political apathy and light poll. Unfortunately, no one has clearly explain the phenomenon. In fact, in order for scholars to understand and explain these concerns, they should carefully look at the phenomenon with diverse perspectives and approaches. The main purpose of this paper is to explain why the digital generation has political apathy and are reluctant to participate in political activities such as voting. Using causal loop analysis which is based on systematic thinking, we not only analyzed the pattern of the digital generation' political participation with regard to diverse perspectives, but also attempted to draw new political implications from the analysis. Based on our analysis, we tried to suggest some implications for political stability and development in South Korea in the future.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.13 no.10
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• pp.278-289
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• 2013

In the democratic country, it is the very natural principle that political party makes the candidate. In spite of that the nomination of political party abolition issue is not in the local election the problem of is being easily solved. Therefore, the recent argument about the nomination of political party of the basic local election and overseas case were organized and the reasonable alternative was sought for. As to the argument related to the nomination of political party, the discussion in which the groping of the waste paper or new alternative is needed stops so that the existing politicians can overcome the nomination of political party evil in spite of the opposition position. In the positive investigation, the populations which are many in the waste paper of the system of public nomination by party agree. However, the bad effect that can be shown up according to the waste paper of the nomination of political party is the woman allocation door. Therefore, some alternatives were presented in the bad effect that can be shown up according to the waste paper of the nomination of political party. This alternative is the participation subject expansion, the introduction of political party claim to support, the introduction of local political party system, the application of upward official nomination procedure, and etc. The participation subject expansion presented logically as the optimum alternative among this method, the decision of the alternative should be confirmed through the social agreement procedure.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.41-67
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• 1991

Local autonomy of Korea's lower-level local council has been reinstated following elections last March for the first time in thirty years. Last June, we had elections for the upper-level local council. Mayors, governors, and administrative chiefs of cities, provinces and other local government bodies are slated for elections in the first half of next year. The impacts of local autonomy are taking effect in not only the political sphere, but also the administrative and economic spheres. In fact, it seems that some modification of all economic policy making and administration is inevitable. Since the initiation of local autonomy, in order to make the economy work more efficiently, it has become quite important to examine the impact of local autonomy on the national economy. The areas of local autonomy include independent legislative power, administrative power, organizational power, and most important of all, the independent public financial power of the local governments. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of local autonomy on the national economy and ways of enhancing the role of local public finance to facilitate settlement and development of the local autonomy system. Local autonomy will contribute to the continuous growth of our economy, allow balanced development, and generate greater efficiency. However, local autonomy can also incur economic costs causing at times short-term price instability, inefficient resource allocation, through tax competition and tax exporting, and insolvency of local government due to abusive fiscal operation. To reduce these side effects, different alternatives must be considered. Local autonomy systems generally provide more efficient resource allocation than centralization. But in the model used in Chapter 3 of this paper, the relative efficiencies of both local autonomy and centralization are determined by comparing the elasticity of substitution between national public goods and local public goods. If the elasticity of substitution is bigger than one, centralization provides a more efficient resource allocation. The development of local autonomy could be attained through democratization of the local public finance system including the following three propositions. I) The independence of public financial power of local governments should be established over central government. Furthermore, a democratically operated scheme of intergovernmental fiscal coordination is especially necessary. 2) In the operation of local finance, direct democracy is needed to induce the voluntary participation of local residents. The residents can take part in planning both the local budget and the development of the community. To attain this goal, all the results of local finance operations should be made public. 3) Among economic ill-effects of the local autonomy system, the most serious one is the possibility of insolvency of local governments. Therefore, measures to limit abusive spending by the local governments should be introduced, such as the fiscal restraints system adopted in the United States.

• Korean Journal of Social Welfare
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• v.59 no.4
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• pp.137-162
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• 2007

In democracy basic rights such as political equality and participation through elections have been respected, opportunities of corporation and opposition have been guaranteed, and ability of self-learning and self-correction have been developed. These positive factors give preconditions for the welfare development in the democratic state. Because in this state adults get the suffrage and the open competition for official positions induces political parties use social policies as means to win the election. That is to say, political parties have an incentive to use various social policies to win the election. Democracy, therefore, has affinity with social policy. The affinity between democracy and social policy can be found also in Korea which was democratized in 1987. But, in Korea, the positive relationship between democracy and social policy is very weak due to the problem of constitutional structures. Korean Parliament usually enacts abstract social act and delegates the right to fill concrete contents of the social acts to the executive. Delegation itself has no problem, but excessive delegation is a problem since the executive can overuse its discretion as sacrificing the social rights of the citizen. In addition social consensus could not be achieved in this constitutional structures, which are a obstacle to establishing a political process in the Parliament to promote the welfare development through party competition. Excessive delegation should be reduced, and the Parliament should fill concrete contents of the social acts as exercising its legislative power more. Then a mechanism of welfare development can be launched in Korea.

• Informatization Policy
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• v.28 no.4
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• pp.19-35
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• 2021

The purpose of this research is to investigate the attributes of the online world and to analyze their influence on democracy. The research focuses on the mayoral by-elections that were held in Seoul and Busan, South Korea, on April 4, 2021. The study demonstrates the characteristics of online spaces and the polarization of the online public through news articles and user comments from the Internet. The research includes topic modeling to measure the diversity of media reports, sentiment analysis to measure online public opinion, and interrupted time series analysis to understand how a particular event influences online attitudes. A combination of these methods is used to attempt to estimate the strength of political polarity in the online environment. The study shows diverse media reports by election region and candidate, where the online public repeatedly reveals high negative and low positive attitudes towards each candidate. Moreover, political polarity can differ based on the level of interest in an election. Although voters pay less attention to a by-election than a presidential election, there is a solid political polarity in the online world. Hence, the research recommends preparing measures to alleviate the polarization as politics requires significant online participation.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.12 no.5
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• pp.13-24
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• 2014

This study is the first model to apply the concept of media engagement to a political campaign by which the voters' mind toward the supporting political candidates, are read. Thus it provides the theoretical and practical implications to the political campaign, and eventually contributes to the development of democracy. For these objectives, the total of 729 people who have the right to vote were telephone surveyed using the peoplemeter, CATI program in the 18th Presidential Election (12 areas including Seoul) of Dec. 19th 2012, and Re and By-election of April 24th 2013. Research question is to examine how the 5 attributes of the media engagement (interest, immersion, relevance, satisfaction and participation), play a role as the moderating variables in cross-correlation, socio-economic status and media properties. The result shows that of the five properties of media engagement, the relevant factor is the important parameter of mediating variable to the causal relationship. The media usage (TV, SNS, print media), socio-economic status (gender, age, income, marriage and area), involvement and the Presidential Election, and Re and By-election are also effective in the five attributes of media engagement. These results suggest that the a study model can measure the campaign effectiveness. This study will contribute significantly to the development of politics, election, media, advertising, and public relations area as well as to promote interdisciplinary research.

• Korean journal of communication and information
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• v.32
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• pp.49-73
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• 2006

During the past decades, public opinion polls have become an ubiquitous tool for probing the complexity of people's beliefs and attitudes on a wide variety of issues. Especially since the late 1970s, the use of polls by news organizations has increased dramatically. Along with the proliferation of traditional polls, in the past few years pollsters and news organizations have come to recognize the advantages of online polls. Increasingly there has been more effort to take the pulse of the public through the Internet. With the Internet's rapid growth during the past years, advocates of online polling often emphasize the relative advantages over traditional polls. Researchers from Harris Black International Ltd., for example, argue that "Internet polling is less expensive and faster and offers higher response rates than telephone surveys." Moreover, since many of the newer online polls draw respondents from large databases of registered Internet users, results of online polls have become more balanced. A series of Harris Black online polls conducted during the 1998 gubernatorial and senatorial elections, for example, has accurately projected the winners in 21 of the 22 races it tracked. Many researchers, however, severely criticize online polls for not being representative of the larger population. Despite the often enormous number of participants, Internet users who participate in online polls tend to be younger, better educated and more affluent than the general population. As Traugott pointed out, the people polled in Internet surveys are a "self selected" group, and thus "have volunteered to be part of the test sample, which could mean they are more comfortable with technology, more informed about news and events ... than Americans who aren't online." The fact that users of online polls are self selected and demographically very different from Americans who have no access to the Internet is likely to influence the estimates of what the majority of people think about social or political issues. One of the goals of this study is therefore to analyze whether people perceive traditional and online public opinion polls differently. While most people might not differentiate sufficiently between traditional random sample polls and non representative online polls, some audiences might perceive online polls as more useful and representative. Since most online polls allow some form of direct participation, mostly in the form of an instant vote by mouse click, and often present their findings based on huge numbers of respondents, consumers of these polls might perceive them as more accurate, representative or reliable than traditional random sample polls. If that is true, perceptions of public opinion in society could be significantly distorted for those who rely on or participate in online polls. In addition to investigating how people perceive random sample and online polls, this study focuses on the perceived impact of public opinion polls. Similar to these past studies, which focused on how public opinion polls can influence the perception of mass opinion, this study will analyze how people perceive the effects of polls on themselves and other people. This interest springs from prior studies of the "third person effect," which have found that people often tend to perceive that persuasive communications exert a stronger influence on others than on themselves. While most studies concerned with the political effects of public opinion polls show that exit polls and early reporting of election returns have only weak or no effects on the outcome of election campaigns, some empirical findings suggest that exposure to polls can move people's opinions both toward and away from perceived majority opinion. Thus, if people indeed believe that polls influence others more than themselves, perceptions of majority opinion could be significantly altered because people might anticipate that others will react more strongly to poll results.