(with ByeongHwa Choi) Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, people have witnessed a deluge of conspiracy theories and disinformation. As the coronavirus poses a significant threat to individuals' lives, these conspiracy theories are dangerous, as they erode public trust and undermine government efforts to fight the virus. This paper examines the political determinants of COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs. Particularly, we analyze how government policy responses to the pandemic and individuals' ideological predispositions interact to shape people's tendencies to believe conspiracy theories. Using survey data from 22 advanced industrial countries, we show that political conservatives are more prone to conspiracy beliefs than liberals. More importantly, this tendency is reinforced when the government adopts stringent containment policies. Our results suggest that governments' policy efforts to contain the coronavirus can trigger an unintended backlash from political conservatives. This study has important implications for the behavioral and attitudinal effects of government containment policies that are often overlooked.

(with Kohei Suzuki) Since old-age programmes mitigate life-course risks that are relevant to individuals across socio-economic groups in ageing societies, all parties have a political incentive to support these initiatives. Nevertheless, pre-existing partisan commitments bind the policy instruments that parties use. Cabinet-level analyses of OECD economies demonstrate that left incumbency relies more on public expenditure than right-wing governments. What is more important is that, in the context of large elderly populations, pension coverage is greater under right-leaning governments, while pension replacement rates are higher in left-leaning governments. This shows that party behaviour related to life course-related policies cannot be explained by the conventional pro-expansion versus the pro-retrenchment partisan politics. Rather, a focus on partisan variation in the use of policy instruments is required.

(with Jeong Hyun Kim) Despite increasing efforts to implement legislative gender quotas, many countries still encounter substantial popular opposition to this policy. Previous work cannot explain why opposition to legislative gender quotas persists, particularly among young men, a group believed to be open to diversity. We develop and test a theoretical framework linking group threat to men's attitudes toward legislative gender quotas. While the salience of perceived group threat could trigger men's opposition to legislative gender quotas, we expect that this effect will be more profound among young men due to the heightened degree of economic insecurity experienced by younger generations. Using original survey experiments in South Korea, this study demonstrates the strong influence of group threat in the formation of negative attitudes toward legislative gender quotas among young men. These effects, however, are not mediated by traditional gender norms. Our findings have significant implications for the study of gender and politics and democratic representation.

(with ByeongHwa Choi) Deservingness theory contends that spending on the elderly is widely supported across age groups because, unlike other groups such as immigrants or the unemployed, senior citizens are perceived as morally worthy of social aid. However, through a survey experiment in Japan, a prototypical aging society, this study shows that in a state with a large population of senior citizens, there is a significant age gap in policy preferences with the working-age population demonstrating stronger opposition to government support for the elderly. To induce empathetic policy attitudes toward the elderly, therefore, effective issue framing is necessary. However, emphasizing economic need is not enough; it is only when both the elderly’s economic need and effort to work are emphasized that we see a positive attitudinal change among the working-age population. In addition, we find that the economically secure are more sensitive to senior citizens’ economic need and effort to work in determining their policy support. By contrast, the economically insecure exhibit unqualified support for the elderly. These findings demonstrate that deservingness for the elderly is not innate, but is driven by conditional altruism. Furthermore, our work emphasizes the importance of issue framing in generating intergenerational solidarity in a rapidly aging society.

(with Josh M. Ryan) How do electoral rules shape the substantive representation of traditionally underrepresented groups? Using an original dataset of introduced and passed bills in the Korean National Assembly, which has both single-member districts and proportional representation, we examine the extent to which institutions condition the relationship between lawmaker gender and the substantive representation of women. While women lawmakers engage in higher levels of substantive representation of women, proportional representation allows both women and men to introduce more women’s issue bills than their counterparts elected through single-member districts. Furthermore, legislators elected through proportional representation are more effective at achieving passage of women’s issue legislation when compared with those elected in single-member districts, and this effect is especially pronounced for men. Our findings show that electoral systems matter for the representation of marginalized groups and that proportional representation systems allow both female and male politicians to increase their substantive representation of women.

(with Nichole M. Bauer and Jeong Hyun Kim) How does the gender of a political leader affect policy compliance of the public during a public health crisis? State and national leaders have taken a variety of policy measures to combat the Covid-19 pandemic, with varying levels of success. While many female leaders have been credited with the spread of Covid-19, often through implementing strict policy measures, there is little understanding of how individual respond to public health policy recommendations made by female and male leaders. This paper investigates whether citizens are more willing to comply with strict policy recommendations about a public health issue when those recommendations are made by a female leader rather than a male leader. Using a survey experiment of American citizens, we compare individuals’ willingness to comply with policy along three dimensions: social distancing, face covering, and contact tracing. Our findings show that a leader’s gender has little impact on policy compliance in general during the pandemic. These findings carry important implications for successful crisis management as well as understanding how a crisis in a non-masculine issue context influences the effectiveness of a leader’s ability to implement measures to mitigate the crisis.

Many studies emphasize the authoritarian bargain to explain why authoritarian regimes develop social welfare in the absence of democratic accountability. Increased welfare support enhances economic security and, in turn, strengthens public support for the regime. However, few studies have empirically demonstrated the core part of the underlying mechanism that welfare support leads to reduced economic insecurity in non-democratic regimes. By analyzing survey data from China, this study examines how labor market programs affect public economic insecurity. The results reveal that vocational training has a U-shaped impact on risk perception. It alleviates perceived insecurity when the unemployment rate is at the low or high end and has negligible effects at the medium level of unemployment rates. Furthermore, the impact of vocational training is particularly strong for individuals with higher incomes, urban hukou, and public sector employment. In contrast, regardless of the unemployment rate, unemployment insurance has a negative effect on risk perception overall. The results show that the type of social policy and macro- as well as micro-level socio-economic attributes should be taken into account to understand the impact of social welfare.

While many studies have shown that greater trade openness affects the overall size of social spending, this study emphasizes that it also affects types of social policies that a government prioritizes. When faced with deepening trade competition, governments tend to use different policy measures to address the opportunities and challenges stemming from their economic competitiveness in the international market. Policy makers in countries with high relative labor costs are likely to privilege social insurances and income transfer. This is because as high labor costs make their workers more vulnerable in the trade competition, governments seek to protect skilled labor in order to maintain their economic advantage in advanced industries. In contrast, when relative labor costs are low, human capital investment programs are likely to be emphasized to enhance productivity and the quality of labor to capitalize the cost competitiveness of a country’s workers. The findings from empirical analyzes of 26 OECD economies from 1991 to 2012 support these arguments.

Recent research finds a significant difference in voting behavior of workers with secure employment and those without. What is less understood are the conditions in which the divergent political choices of these two groups overlap. Focusing on two types of labor market policies—unemployment insurance and active labor market programs, this paper examines how more generous government spending on different types of welfare programs shapes the electoral behavior of individuals with adverse labor market experience. By using multilevel analysis of individual surveys from 18 European countries (1999–2015), I find that unemployed and temporary workers are more likely to vote against traditional left-wing parties and to withdraw from voting at all. The greater spending on unemployment insurance, however, alters the outcome by realigning insecure workers with old left parties such as social democratic and center-left socialist parties. By contrast, expenditure on active labor market programs has a weak conditional impact in general. The important implication of this study is that while government policy does moderate the effect of adverse labor market experience, types of social policy matters in understanding policy feedback effects. I further discuss this point in relation to the different implications of income support and activation programs for risk mitigation.

(With Weihua An) Prior studies have lent mixed evidence on the effectiveness of increasing government wages to reduce corruption. Based on a dynamic principal–agent model, this study uses cross-country data over ten years (1999–2008) and various statistical models to present updated evidence. Our analyses show that increasing government relative wage by one unit (i.e., by the amount of the average manufacturing wage in a country) is associated with a decrease in the level of perceived corruption by 0.26 units. The effect appears to be particularly significant for non-OECD countries (where corruption is more rampant) or for countries with a relatively low government wage. The overall policy implication is: increasing government wages can help curtail corruption, but solely relying on increasing government wages to reduce corruption can be very costly. For example, to reduce the level of corruption in non-OECD countries to that in OECD countries, the government wage would have to be increased by about seven times.

(With Timothy Hellwig) What determines popular attitudes toward immigration? Recent work emphasises the importance of education rather than economic or labour market factors. Missing from this work, however, is a consideration of elite positions. This study extends education-based accounts in two key ways: by acknowledging the multidimensional nature of the immigration issue and by incorporating cues from party elites. Cues from trusted elites inform popular attitudes on immigration. But rather than serving as a heuristic for the less sophisticated, elite cues on immigration are disproportionately employed by those more educated individuals who rely on elite positions to form opinions on multidimensional issues, like immigration, on which they are cross-pressured. Theoretical expectations are supported by evidence from cross-national analyses of party positions and public opinion and from a longitudinal examination of mass and party positions in Denmark. The results call attention to the importance of dimensionality in the formation of issue opinions.

(with Timothy Hellwig and Jack Vowles) The Global Financial Crisis of 2008-2009 was catalyst for the most precipitous economic downturn in eight decades. This book examines how the GFC and ensuing Great Recession affected electoral politics in the world's developed democracies. The initial wave of research on the crisis concluded it did little to change the established relationships between voters, parties, and elections. Yet nearly a decade since the initial shock, the political landscape has changed in many ways, the extent to which has not been fully explained by existing studies. Democracy Under Siege? pushes against the received wisdom by advancing a framework for understanding citizen attitudes, preferences, and behaviour. It makes two central claims. First, while previous studies of the GFC tend to focus on an immediate impact of the crisis, Hellwig, Kweon, and Vowles argue that economic malaise has a long lasting impact. In addition to economic shock, the economic recovery has a significant impact on citizens' assessment of political elites. Second, the authors argue that unanticipated exogenous shocks like the GFC grants party elites an opening for political manoeuvre through public policy and rhetoric. As a result, political elites have a high degree of agency to shape public perceptions and behaviour. Political parties can strategically moderate citizens' economic uncertainty, mobilise/demobilise voters, and alter individuals' political preferences. By leveraging data from over 150,000 individuals across over 100 nationally-representative post-election surveys from the 1990s to 2017, this book shows how economic change during a tumultuous era affected economic perceptions, policy demands, political participation, and the vote.

(Book Chapter in Japan Decides 2021. Edited by Robert J. Pekkanen, Steven R. Reed, and Daniel M. Smith) This chapter examines women’s representation in the Japan. In the economic realm, Womenomics implemented under the Abe regime made several meaningful improvements in women’s labor participation, especially those who have children. However, little progress was in the gender wage gap and the gender disparity in quality job employment. The COVID-19 pandemic also had a disproportionate impact on women, parents, and those with non-regular jobs. This, in turn, led to lower trust and confidence in the government and its policy responses to the pandemic. The latter half of this chapter considers gender representation in politics. The 2021 general election saw a decrease in the number of women representatives. As with previous elections, the ruling party, Liberal Democratic Party, had the smallest share of female candidates and elected women legislators. This chapter examines both supply- and demand-side factors in order to explain the lack of women representation in Japan.