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Mind the Electoral Gap: the Effect of Investment in Public Infrastructure on Authoritarian Support in South Korea

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Abstract

This study examines the effect of investment in transportation infrastructure on regime support in an electoral authoritarian regime. Using a difference-in-difference analysis of neighborhood-level panel data on a subway system from 1971–1985 in urban South Korea, we find that incumbent vote share increased in neighborhoods surrounding the newly constructed subway stations. We show that subway construction was effective at boosting regime support, especially in neighborhoods where people are more likely to read about the government propaganda of subway construction from newspapers. We also provide anecdotal evidence of private economic gains contributing to the increased support for the ruling party. The results suggest that investment in welfare-enhancing goods and services such as public transportation may help autocrats of developing countries to retain political power by increasing electoral support for their ruling parties.

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Notes

  1. National Assembly elections were held in 1963, 1967, 1971, 1973, 1978, 1981, and 1985.

  2. Data are available from the Korean Statistics Information System, Statistics Korea (URL: http://kosis.kr).

  3. In 1950, agriculture, forestry, and fishing accounted for 42.3% of the country’s total gross product compared with mining and manufacturing with 14.1%. In 1969, agriculture, forestry, and fishing accounted for 28.3% of total gross product compared with mining and manufacturing with 25.9%.

  4. In 1970, the population of Seoul reached 5.43 million and 76% of Seoul’s population lived in Kangbuk.

  5. We also use 1200 m as a threshold and report the results in Appendix Tables 9, 10, and 11. The results remain similar except for those in Appendix Table 10. In Appendix Table 10, the interaction terms are not statistically significant. This is possibly due to the correlation between newspaper circulation and subway (1200 m) being higher than the correlation between newspaper circulation and subway (800 m), which is confirmed by the data. We also replicate columns (2) and (4) of Table 3 using 400 m, 800 m, and 1200 m buffers and report the results in Appendix Fig. 2. The figure shows that the main effect of subway construction is robust over a range of buffer sizes.

  6. South Korea has six metropolitan cities (gwangyeoksi), one special city (teukbyeolsi), one special self-governing city (teukbyeol-jachisi), and nine provinces (do). These administrative divisions are further subdivided into cities (si), counties (gun), districts (gu), towns (eup), townships (myeon), neighborhoods (dong), and villages (ri). Neighborhood is our unit of analysis.

  7. The data is collected from the following URL: http://info.nec.go.kr.

  8. URL: http://gis.seoul.go.kr.

  9. URL: http://sgis.kostat.go.kr.

  10. The data is collected from the following URL: http://kostat.go.kr/portal/korea/index.action. Other socioeconomic variables that may confound the relationship between our independent and dependent variables of interest are not available for this time period.

  11. Summary statistics are reported in Appendix Table 12.

  12. We replicate the main results for the Chun period only because (1) the housing data do not include a category for “apartment” in 1960 and 1970 and data on apartments are only available starting 1975 and (2) the 3-nuclei plan was announced after the planning and construction of Line 1 that happened under Park. Appendix Table 14 replicates the matching analyses reported in Table 5 including apartment construction as a pre-treatment indicator of economic development and shows that the results remain similar. The housing data is obtained from the following URL: http://kosis.kr.

  13. Appendix Table 15 shows summary statistics for areas with and without subway stations and high/low newspaper circulation areas.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of East Asian Studies, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, USA

    Joan E. Cho

  2. Department of Urban Design and Planning, Hongik University, Seoul, South Korea

    Jae Seung Lee

  3. Department of Policy Studies, Hanyang University, Seoul, South Korea

    B. K. Song

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  1. Joan E. Cho
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  3. B. K. Song
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Correspondence to B. K. Song.

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Appendix

Appendix

Fig. 2
figure 2

Notes: This figure replicates columns (2) and (4) of Table 3 using 400 m, 800 m, and 1200 m as a threshold for treatment. The circles show the estimates of the treatment effect and the vertical lines represent 95% confidence intervals.a Park (1971–1973). b Chun (1981–1985)

Buffer size and the effect of subway construction on the vote percent of incumbent presidential party.

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Table 9 Subway and support for the incumbent presidential party (1200-m threshold)
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Table 10 Subway, newspaper circulation, and support for the incumbent presidential party (Park) (1200-m threshold)
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Table 11 Subway, newspaper circulation, and support for the incumbent presidential party (Park) (1200-m threshold)
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Table 12 Summary statistics
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Table 13 Subway and support for the incumbent presidential party (Chun (1981–1985))
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Table 14 Matching results (Chun (1981–1985))
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Table 15 Summary statistics for newspaper circulations and subway stations
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Cho, J.E., Lee, J.S. & Song, B.K. Mind the Electoral Gap: the Effect of Investment in Public Infrastructure on Authoritarian Support in South Korea. St Comp Int Dev 54, 473–500 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-019-09289-y

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