Candidate Quality and Negative Voting in New Democracies: A Test Based on a Korean Presidential Election.

In recent decades, there has been rising interest in candidate quality and characteristics among political scientists. Scholars have analyzed the impact of candidate quality on electorates' candidate evaluations and vote choice. Most of the often-cited work on candidate quality deals with candidates and elections in the U.S. with a lesser amount of work focusing on European countries. It is remarkable that very few of these studies on candidate quality focus on elections in new democracies. As new democracies have had relatively little time to develop candidate recruitment processes, candidate quality is probably low compared to the established democracies of Western Europe and North America. Therefore, new democracies can be fertile ground for the study of the lack of candidate quality and its impact on voting behavior. In this paper, we study candidate quality and elections in one of the new democracies, Korea. Previous studies of voting behavior in Korea and in new democracies, in general, usually look at the vote choice of the electorate along established and/or emerging social cleavages, such as class differences, regionalism, religion, as well as macro environmental factors, such as the national economy. We utilize survey data to analyze the impact of the specific quality of candidates (candidate characteristics) on the vote choice of the electorate. If the quality of political candidates does not keep pace with that of the sophisticated public, we may see apathy on the part of the electorate (low turnout) or a form of negative voting. The election we analyze is the latest presidential election in Korea held in December 2007. Our results show a high level of negative voting in response to the candidates' perceived negative traits. Our work is a testimony that voters in new democracies also pay attention to the individual candidate's quality or characteristics, and make their vote choice accordingly. Therefore, future studies of voting behavior in new democracies should include candidate quality (or characteristics, traits or whatever it is called) as an explanatory variable in their models. We end the paper by offering our conjecture about why the electorate's perception of candidate quality is so low in Korea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]