“A Guidebook on Korean Voting Tendencies”

Dong-A Ilbo’s recent report on Korean voting tendencies is drawing a great deal of attention. People have said, “This objective data gave us a clear picture on voting tendencies that have been vaguely understood.” The report was based on an analysis of outcomes of three former presidential elections, the 14th, 15th, and 16th elections, using the Geographic Information System (GIS) method.

Regarding this, Kim Jong-ryul, a lawmaker of the ruling Uri Party whose local constituency is Goisan, Chungbuk which was reported to be a district that demonstrates the strongest correlation with the national voting tendency in all of the three elections, said that, “Even though I thought that my constituency was a microcosm of the national election, the statistical figures that confirmed such thinking were actually surprising to me.”

Kim Choong-whan, lawmaker of the main opposition Grand National Party (GNP), whose local constituency is Gangdong-gu, Seoul, which was reported to be a ‘barometer’ district to predict national voting outcomes, said that, “Since this report is based on objective data, I believe it is also very useful to predict this year’s presidential election outcomes.”

Rep. Lim Tae-hee, president of the GNP Yeouido research center, said that, “If we regard voters as customers of our political services, this report can be regarded as a kind of guidebook that teaches us the trend of voting market.”

Seo Hye-seok, Uri Party spokeswoman, also said that, “This analysis enhanced the credibility of voting reports by adopting scientific and in-depth methods of analyzing voting,” adding, “I think that it will provide a stepping stone to a more development in the sector of reporting news related to elections.”

Kim Jeong-hye, executive director of the Korea Research Center, said that, “It was a very useful analysis that studies specific dimensions of surveys related to voting.”

For more information about this survey, visit www.dongA.com. By clicking on districts you are interested in among 244 districts on the city, gun, and gu (relatively large) level, and 3514 districts in eup, myeon, dong (relatively small) level, you can see voting tendency of each region. GIS software of Sundosoft Inc. was used to provide this web service.

mindy@donga.com daviskim@donga.com