Benchmarking the pandemic: how do citizens react to domestic COVID-19 conditions compared to other countries’?

ABSTRACT

This study examines how relative policy performance against the spread of COVID-19 corresponds to citizens’ political support. We argue that citizens form political attitude using relative COVID-19 assessments with other governments. We also examine the extent to which relative comparative assessments are likely among sophisticated voters. Using original survey data from South Korea in April 2020, we found that a relatively positive evaluation of incumbent performance corresponds to higher political support. This paper is well situated in the existing literature as it shows that voters who benchmark the performance of other countries make an informed decision regarding their political support.

Acknowledgement

We are grateful to the editor and anonymous reviewers of JEPOP for their insightful and constructive feedback which helped to improve the manuscript substantially. We thank Mary Stegmaier, Michael Lewis-Beck, Jungkun Seo, and Han Soo Lee for extensive comments on previous versions. We thank Jung Suk Park (Hankook Research) for providing support with the data preparation. Finally, we are grateful to the participants of the University of Reading Politics and IR Research Seminar group (UK) and the 2022 Annual Conference of the Korean Association of Party Studies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a stricter comparison in showing the spread of the virus in countries compared to South Korea, we limit the time span of new coverage around the time that the survey was filed. Figure 1 in Online Appendix presents the keyword network around COVID-19 news, which is based on 405,112 news items about COVID-19 from 44 news agencies in Korea, between 1 December 2019 and 30 April 2020. This also gives a good rational for picking the countries for comparisons in Figure 2.

2 Further information on data, sampling strategy, distribution, etc. is available in Online Appendix.

3 South Korea introduced a mixed electoral system, meaning that a majority of the members are elected from constituencies using the first-past-the-post system, while others are elected at a national level through proportional representation. We used the information based on constituency-level election outcomes.

4 The list of questions is available in Online Appendix 1-1.

5 To see if the similar relationships exist in other institutions such as National Assembly (i.e. Congress) and Court, we further examined and found that the relative performance compared to other countries increases the level of trust in National Assembly and Court.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jungsub Shin

Jungsub Shin is an assistant professor in comparative politics in the Department of Political Science and IR at Soongsil University, Seoul, S. Korea. His research concentrates on elections and voting behavior, and explores electoral consequences of public policy using cross-national samples.

Brandon Beomseob Park

Brandon B. Park is an assistant professor in comparative politics in the Department of Political Science and IR at Soongsil University, Seoul, S. Korea. His research focuses on citizens' capacity to constrain representatives for their policy performance home and abroad.