The Role of Timing and Presidential Popularity in Local Elections: Upheaval in the 2018 Busan City Council Election

Abstract

The 2018 local elections completely upended the composition of Busan’s city council, with the council membership changing from being solidly and consistently conservative to being over 80% liberal. What explains this anomalous outcome? While existing literature suggests the outcome of the 2018 city council elections was the consequence of a combination of structural and strategic factors, such as the decline of regional voting, we argue that the individual-level evaluation of President Moon Jae-in is one of the primary factors driving this result. Although coattails effects are commonly considered in concurrent national legislative elections, the Presidentialized and nationalized politics of Korea makes it possible for Presidential elections to affect local elections as well. We assess our explanation through an analysis of repeated cross-sectional survey data collected just before the 2018 local elections. The results of the analysis show that support for the Democratic Party is very strongly predicted by individual-level evaluation of President Moon. When considered in the context of the timing of presidential and local elections, the results suggest that Presidential coattail effects are capable of destabilizing established political patterns, such as regional voting, if perhaps only in a sporadic and idiosyncratic fashion, depending on whether or not local elections are held early on in a President’s term.