Institutional Interaction and Strategic Voting in Korea's New Mixed Electoral System

Abstract

Korea newly adopted a standard mixed electoral system in March 2004, just a month before the 2004 parliamentary election. Using both district and individual level data from the election, this study addresses the issue of institutional interaction or contamination in a mixed electoral system with focus on a third-place party, the Democratic Labor Party. It finds that there is no meaningful effect of institutional interaction between the SMD and PR sections of a mixed electoral system. Even if SMD and PR are put together into a single mixed electoral system, each of the two is found to retain its independent effect on a party system without much confluence. Thus, in the SMD component, we still observe a significant rate of strategic voting and, consequently, a minor political party is penalized in terms of vote share. Meanwhile, the contaminating effect of SMD on PR is only a conditional effect, which is true only if voters hold favorable preferences toward a minor political party in the first place. Otherwise, the putative effect of SMD on PR does not materialize.