Search results

Abstract
South Korean women are less favourable towards open admission policies for North Korean defectors, less supportive of assistance to defectors, and less willing to integrate with defectors than are South Korean men. Such a gender gap contradicts the findings of studies on refugee attitudes in Western countries. This article proposes two distinct explanations for the gap: 1. intra-gender competition induced by a gendered labour market and gender-imbalanced defector inflows and 2. gendered outgroup attitudes where women show greater anxiety and aversion towards an unfamiliar outgroup than do men. The explanations are tested using annually repeated cross-sectional survey data (2007–18). I find more consistent support for the gendered outgroup attitude explanation. Whilst South Koreans of both genders increasingly see the two Koreas as socio-culturally distinct, such perceptions of otherness are more strongly linked to negative defector attitudes among South Korean women. I also provide first-cut evidence that knowledge of North Korean society and politics mitigates the outgroup anxiety and, in turn, can mitigate the gender gap in defector attitudes. These findings hold implications for defector and refugee policies in South Korea and other refugee host countries in the region.

AbstractMuch scholarly attention has been given to the potentially disruptive distributional implications of new technologies in labor markets. Less explored is the way citizens as socially embedded individuals perceive and respond to technological transformation. This study fills this gap by exploring how welfare state institutions shape and are shaped by citizens' perceptions of technological transformation. My analysis covering over 50 developed and developing countries finds that welfare state generosity is associated with a greater acceptance of technological change. I also provide evidence consistent with the expectation that labor market interventions of the welfare state have the potential to reduce the skill cleavage over technological transformation by mitigating the insecurity faced by the low-skilled. Additionally, citizens embracing technological transformation are more supportive of the welfare state than techno-skeptics are.

AbstractSince its democratization, South Korea has widened the population coverage of various social programs, yet the generosity of most programs remains shallow. Existing studies offer state/elite-centered explanations for this move toward a weak universalistic welfare state. I suggest that the move rather accurately reflects citizen attitudes as well: a majority of Koreans across economic classessupportwelfare state expansion, yet a large segment of the self-proclaimed supporters areunwilling to payfor the expansion. I argue that underlying such mixed attitudes is the perceived unfairness of the tax and transfer systems. More specifically, (1) the perception of unfair contribution vis-à-vis other taxpayers and (2) the perception of unfair fiscal exchange with the government significantly lower one's willingness to contribute to the welfare state. My analysis of a nation-wide survey lends support to my argument. My findings have important policy implications for the emerging economies where, despite a growing citizen demand for social protection, the fiscal support base for welfare state expansion is frail.

South Korea and Singapore display distinctive patterns of social provision. The Singaporean welfare state has served as the primary provider of social infrastructure and services, whereas the South Korean welfare state has developed its primary role in supporting income maintenance. These differences are not well accounted for in the existing literature, which focuses on similarities between the two regimes. This paper shows that deep institutional legacies in the two countries' respective financial structures powerfully shaped their unique social policy instruments. In South Korea, where financial openness was low and firms relied on relationship-based financing, the corresponding long-term perspectives on production and employment encouraged the private provision of welfare-related infrastructure and services. In Singapore, where firms have relied heavily on arm's length financing, the corresponding flexible investment and employment perspectives encouraged the utilization of private income maintenance arrangements. Each country's government prioritized the mode of social provision that the firms were less willing to engage in. These findings suggest that financial liberalization may be an important determinant of welfare regimes in developing countries.

AbstractSouth Korea and Singapore display distinctive patterns of social provision. The Singaporean welfare state has served as the primary provider of social infrastructure and services, whereas the South Korean welfare state has developed its primary role in supporting income maintenance. These differences are not well accounted for in the existing literature, which focuses on similarities between the two regimes. This paper shows that deep institutional legacies in the two countries' respective financial structures powerfully shaped their unique social policy instruments. In South Korea, where financial openness was low and firms relied on relationship-based financing, the corresponding long-term perspectives on production and employment encouraged the private provision of welfare-related infrastructure and services. In Singapore, where firms have relied heavily on arm's length financing, the corresponding flexible investment and employment perspectives encouraged the utilization of private income maintenance arrangements. Each country's government prioritized the mode of social provision that the firms were less willing to engage in. These findings suggest that financial liberalization may be an important determinant of welfare regimes in developing countries.

Abstract
While the Biden administration has framed US–China relations as part of a broader contest between democracy and autocracy, the potential international repercussions of this stance remain unclear. How will other democracies and, in particular, the citizens of key democratic US allies respond to a world characterized by increasing rivalry between dictatorships and democracies? We seek to answer this question through survey experiments in Japan and South Korea. We randomly assign information to respondents, highlighting the differences in democracy and human rights practices in the US–China relationship. Despite prior research and recent US policy documents suggesting that increasing tension over democracy and human rights in US–China relations will lead to democratic US allies moving even closer to the United States, our findings diverge from this expectation. When provided with information about this tension, the level of support for more cooperation with Washington decreases in both Japan and Korea. Our findings point to the need to revisit an assumption in much of the academic literature: Given a choice between cooperation with authoritarian and democratic countries in conflict, democracies—and their publics—will gravitate toward the latter.

The literature suggests that voters have a self-centered incentive to call for the de-escalation of conflicts that inflict economic costs on them, which explains why economic sanctions and trade wars often lose popular support when the resulting cost for the domestic economy rises. It is thus puzzling why some costly disputes between two advanced democracies are prolonged. Taking a psychological approach, we argue that nonviolent yet costly disputes between international rivals can fail to de-escalate because the perception of loss invokes anger and risk-taking attitudes. We test our argument using a paired conjoint experiment involving Japan and South Korea. We find that, in both countries, the public becomes more defiant and less supportive of de-escalating an ongoing dispute when informed about (1) the high cost of the trade restrictions on domestic firms, (2) international (i.e., World Trade Organization) support for the rival country, and (3) the rival public's hardline stance on the dispute. These findings lend support to our psychological explanation.

The extent of the rich–poor divide in attitudes to welfare varies across societies. Existing studies focus on the progressivity of the welfare system and macroeconomic conditions to explain cross-society variation. We shed light on another factor that we believe is key to understanding the variation: the public's knowledge of the welfare state. We suggest that the prevalent ignorance of how welfare state institutions work dilutes the rich–poor divide over social spending, especially in emerging welfare states. We empirically illustrate our point using original survey data from South Korea, a country where previous studies repeatedly found little or no effect of economic class on welfare state attitudes. We reveal a strong income-based cleavage over social spending in a subset of the Korean population with more accurate knowledge of the welfare system. Our findings carry important implications for understanding and projecting welfare state politics in a broader set of emerging welfare states.

AbstractExogenous shocks such as pandemics have a profound influence on how citizens think about their country. We explore how the successful handling of COVID‐19 shaped South Korean citizens' perception of their country. Empirically, we compare data from surveys conducted in August 2019 and April 2020. Using regression on matched samples, we find a significant increase in general national pride. More importantly, we find an increase in positive assessments of their country in domains directly related to the COVID‐19 response (civic awareness and international leadership) but not in domains less directly related to the pandemic. We also find that while Koreans take pride in their collective response to the crisis, their disenchantment with the political class has grown. The implication is that citizens offer a remarkably nuanced understanding of how the COVID‐19 response reflected the strengths of the Korean society, as opposed to the Korean political system.

How does economic globalisation influence individuals' welfare state preferences? Moving beyond the unidimensional understanding of globalisation exposure, we intersect two dimensions of exposure perceptions (gain vs loss and individual vs societal impacts) and propose a novel typology: collective winner, lone winner, lone loser and collective loser. We then explain the preference gap among losers (collective losers vis-à-vis lone losers) and among winners (collective winners vis-à-vis lone winners) by considering three distinct motivations for welfare state support: compensation, risk-pooling and inequality reduction. We illustrate the usefulness of our typology using an original survey in South Korea. We find that lone winners are far more supportive of welfare spending than collective winners. At the same time, collective losers are found to be much more supportive of welfare spending than lone losers. We provide some first-cut evidence that the insurance-seeking motivation common to lone winners and collective losers drive their welfare state support.

The extent of the rich–poor divide in attitudes to welfare varies across societies. Existing studies focus on the progressivity of the welfare system and macroeconomic conditions to explain cross-society variation. We shed light on another factor that we believe is key to understanding the variation: the public's knowledge of the welfare state. We suggest that the prevalent ignorance of how welfare state institutions work dilutes the rich–poor divide over social spending, especially in emerging welfare states. We empirically illustrate our point using original survey data from South Korea, a country where previous studies repeatedly found little or no effect of economic class on welfare state attitudes. We reveal a strong income-based cleavage over social spending in a subset of the Korean population with more accurate knowledge of the welfare system. Our findings carry important implications for understanding and projecting welfare state politics in a broader set of emerging welfare states.

Scholars and policymakers have long examined whether and to what extent public income transfer programs create work disincentives. Less explored are the patterns and mechanisms through which perceived work disincentives shape public attitudes toward such programs. The present article bridges this gap by examining how individuals' exposure to a moral hazard discourse affects their support for an income transfer program. Our original survey experiment in South Korea finds that the effect of an identically worded piece of moral hazard information plays out differently depending on the eligibility criteria of the program in question (means‐tested vs. universal) and the economic status of the respondents. The findings have significant implications for understanding the support base for the welfare state in the context of resurging interest in basic/guaranteed income.

Abstract
Scholars have long debated whether economic globalization increases citizen support for welfare policies to compensate for or insure against the new economic risks. The vast majority of what we know about such issues is gleaned from study of Western polities. We know little of such dynamics in Asia, the continent harboring much of the world's population and having experienced the most extensive development in economic globalization. This article remedies such silence by focusing on public opinion in Asian countries to substantially rethink whether and under what conditions globalization exposure generates support for welfare spending. We argue that two such conditions are crucial: (a) levels of economic development influencing who wins and loses under globalization and (b) existing institutions for social protection that influence whether globalization's losers look to public forms of compensation. We find support for our rethinking of embedded liberalism using five rounds of the Asiabarometer survey covering 28 Asian countries.