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Expressiveness and Voting Decision: New Evidence from the Korean Parliamentary Election*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 April 2014

MAN-SOO JOO  and
SUNGHO YUN
MAN-SOO JOO
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Hanyang University, Ansan, Koreamsjoo@hanyang.ac.kr
SUNGHO YUN
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Hanyang University, Ansan, Koreauwyunsh@hanyang.ac.kr
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Abstract

According to the expressive view of voting, a voter derives expressive utility from casting a vote. We present two possible sources of expressive utility: social interaction with voters having the same political preferences, and interestingness of the election. First, it has been suggested that a voter's expressive utility may increase when there are more voters having the same political preference. We extend this line of study and test the hypothesis that a voter's expressive utility increases as the number of voters having the same political preferences increases in the local community, where interaction occurs more frequently with others than it does with others in distant communities. Second, we propose and test the other hypothesis, that voters’ expressive utility is larger when the election is more interesting. Using 2008 parliamentary election data from Korea, where the election consists of both 245 single-member districts and only one nationwide district for proportional representatives, we find supporting evidence for these two arguments: the turnout rate is significantly and positively related to the share of proportional representation votes for the largest party in each single-member district; the turnout rate is also significantly and positively related to the number of polls for single-member district election conducted by major broadcasting companies, which we use as a proxy variable for interestingness of the election.

Type
Research Article
Information
Japanese Journal of Political Science , Volume 15 , Issue 2: Quality of Life and Environmentalism in ASEAN , June 2014 , pp. 259 - 274
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

We thank Imho Kang and four anonymous referees for their helpful suggestions and comments.

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