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In the last 30 years South Korea has seen rapid institutional changes, leaving behind military dictatorships and evolving into a strong consolidated democracy. This paper will explore voting in South Korea, attempting to answer the research question: Why has the liberal party not been winning elections? The present liberal administration has not had power since 2000. This research is important because it takes a holistic approach in defining the variables at play to the Korean voter as well as refining what seems to be the significant factors to voting choices. There is little research done on the Korean case which tries to understand why Korean voters have voted as they do since the inception of democracy. My paper will attempt to add to the discussion the significant variables at play to the Korean voter. Using quantitative data from the Asian Barometer Survey from 2010-2012 and 2013-2016 to research this paper's aim. The Asian Barometer Survey provides valuable data into studying voting in South Korea as voters directly answer the survey. The regression models showed that government trust and satisfaction were the most important variables in explaining why voters chose the conservative or the liberal party and not economic conditions.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Time spent in the military has the ability to guide service members with political characteristics that influence voting behavior and political involvement throughout life. The objective of this thesis is investigating the relationship between military service and their personal political ideology. This thesis will address political socialization as an agent, while truly understanding the difficulty in what time spent in the service has. The research questions addressed are: How much does military service contribute to an individual’s political ideology? and, Does military service alter an individual’s political belief from a neutral or liberal perspective to a more conservative view? The variables of political socialization are as vast as our imagination, and is a constant changing process. The course from which we form our political views is indicative of the social constructs from which we are subjected to. The ebbs and flows of life experiences is for the most part planned. To what extent our life experiences shape our views could never be calculated. There are, however, variables that can be applied to almost all human life such as our peers, family, institutions, education, strife, success, struggle, and perseverance. Most can understand that family and school are important early in life. Later as adults; peers, literature, education, and socioeconomic status is more impressionable. This research aims to discover military service as an agent with the ability to frame forming opinions. Military service is not a rare human experience of itself, but is rare in its ability to hold all of the above variables in a complete surrounding environment. Military service has the unique ability to sever ties from outside influence, inhabit complete social submersion, force uniformity in thought, regularity in action, all during the time an individual is most impressionable towards political ideas. This is interesting as it tests a full immersion political socialization environment to what we label ourselves in the grand scheme of political constructs over a life time.

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This study tests the relationship of the 6 ideological variables and 7 contextual variables to shifts in ideological alignment through a latent class regression analysis for three periods of years (1972-1978, 1980-1992, 1993-2006). The latent class regression models determine the number of identifiable classes for each model. Using ideological realignment theory (Abramowitz and Saunders 1998) this study finds there has been a moderate polarization of opinions that has occurred, as well as, a moderate hardening of ideological beliefs with moral issues during the third time period becoming the driving force in ideological makeup. With regard to the culture wars hypothesis (Hunter 1991) there seems to be so much randomness in peoples overall ideological makeup that it hardly suggests a salient culture war is taking place. It also seems to matter very little what opinions individuals express on domain specific issues with regard to political ideology.

In 1997, both the United States (U.S.) and the European Union (EU) signed the Kyoto Protocol, the first legally binding international treaty with targets for greenhouse gas emissions reductions. However, in 2001, the United States withdrew from the Protocol. This thesis seeks to understand some of the reasons why the European Union embraced the Kyoto Protocol while the United States did not. Using an overall framework of comparative politics, research is undertaken through three lenses. First, an overview of public opinion toward global warming and climate change in the U.S. and the EU analyzes potential differences or similarities from surveys carried out in each area. Second, I examine the prevailing political ideology in each polity, with emphasis on the period when climate change arose as a major global challenge. Finally, two case studies examine the theory of environmental federalism and how it might affect climate change policy action. I obtained the following results. Public opinion research has revealed that, on average, the American public is nearly as concerned with climate change as the European public. However, the overarching political ideology in the U.S. was one of conservatism, while that in Europe was one of social democracy, with left and center-left governments, contributing to a greater or lesser degree, and through indirect mechanisms, to the political stances adopted. Finally, the case of Germany shows that member state actions, such as the implementation of ambitious reductions targets, can still play a crucial role in leadership even in the presence of action at the central government level (EU). The California case study shows that state-level efforts can rise to fill a vacuum created by the absence of central government action. In the end, behavior of each polity regarding international climate agreements, particularly the Kyoto Protocol, cannot be explained in simple terms.; The complexity of the issues revolving climate change require further interdisciplinary research and collaboration among multiple actors including scientists, policymakers, nongovernmental organizations, and other stakeholders.

This thesis seeks to examine the levels of support for African American reparations amongst minorities. After providing a historical account of redress efforts separated racial group and discussing factors that influence reparations, I argue that minority groups possess cross-racial linked fate (minority linked fate) that significantly impacts their political attitudes concerning reparations for African Americans. Additionally, I argue that higher levels of minority-linked fate will equate to significant support for reparations. The probit regressions reaffirm the initial hypotheses that minority-linked fate has a significant impact on support for African American reparations. However, the racial groups most affected were not suspected initially.

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Acknowledged as the defining challenge of our time, economic inequality has far reaching individual and societal consequences. It negatively affects productivity, decision-making, and health outcomes on the one hand, and political stability and economic growth on the other. Increased competition for resources not allocated at the top skews available reference frames and leads to adoption of unachievable standards, generating stressful social comparisons and anxiety that may intensify inter-group conflicts. Yet, as this dissertation shows on data from surveys from across the world, many of the worse off tend to believe that the social world in general is fair and that large differences in incomes are justified and even necessary. To understand why and how are the widespread and entrenched differences in incomes and wealth not being contested at a larger scale, this dissertations links perceptions and judgments of economic inequalities to their perceived, and often misjudged, normativity. It is argued that there is a need for a greater attention and understanding of people’s beliefs about what are the popular opinions and shared values regarding political issues. It is not only that people not know of inequalities, underestimate them, or attempt to rationalize their existence as fair and deserved. It is that people also need to know that their sentiments are shared by others. Based on results of multiple experimental studies, this thesis explored and supported a possibility that people who believe that the unequal status quo is unsatisfactory and that the standing system should be challenged and changed also tend to believe that their views are not shared by the general population. Even more, such thinking tends to get reinforced when someone else is critical of the system in place. Thus, instead of rising in spirit and assuming that others will finally see at least some of the negative outcomes of the way things are, those hoping for change may get demoralized, feel isolated in their views, and may feel drawn to compromises they shouldn't need to consider. In particular, the dissertation mainly utilizes the framework of conservatism being a motivated political cognition (Jost et al., 2003) which proposes that adoption of system-legitimizing attitudes may be motivated by psychological needs to see the social world as orderly, structured, and generally just and fair. In four chapters, the dissertations explores how the conditions theorized to motivate adoption of status-legitimizing attitudes affect not only these attitudes, but also the perceptions of their normativeness. Chapter 2 presents a comprehensive test of the original reading of status-legitimacy hypothesis (Jost, Pelham, Sheldon, & Ni Sullivan, 2003) which implied that those with lower objective status are the most motivated to system-justify, and of the re-specified version (van der Toorn et al., 2015) that posits subjective powerlessness to be the driver of undue system legitimization. Presented are results of a mixed-effects analysis of ISSP data on social inequality, covering almost 50,000 respondents from 28 countries. The results from analysis testing contextual moderation lend more support for the original, rather than the revised reading of status-legitimacy hypothesis - that it is the objectively disadvantaged who may experience greater motivation to defend the system. Chapter 3 adopts Lane's (1986) perspective explaining that political institutions create more dissonance than market institutions, and tests a proposition that while political institutions will be perceived as legitimate by the members of the lower classes, market institutions will be seen as less legitimate. Second, we hypothesize that those over and under-estimating their social class should report higher or lower perceived legitimacy of the system. Analysis of data from General Social Survey (2010-2016; total n = 4142) shows that those in lower classes report higher confidence in political, but not market institutions compared to those members of the upper classes. Similarly, relative to those under- or correctly estimating their class, those over-estimating their class positioning reported higher confidence in political compared to market institutions. Chapter 4 presents two experimental studies testing, on a sample of 201 students (in Tilburg, the Netherlands), how indirect threat to the country's culture and a direct criticism of the country's economic performance influence people's perceptions of attitudinal similarity with their society in general depending on their prior ideological views. The results suggest that those with views critical of the standing socio-political system imagine their co-nationals as more attitudinally different compared to those who consider the standing system to be fair and desirable. In particular, exposure to economic threat, but not cultural threat, increased the perceived ideological distance from the presumed attitudes of the rest of the society among those critical of the system, but not among those who considered the system to be fair and desirable as it is. Chapter 5 presents data from two studies conducted before and after the 2016 US Presidential election (mTurk, n = 478), and before and after the 2017 UK general election (Prolific Academic, n = 617). Data were gathered in two rounds, utilizing the same between-subjects experimental design to assess whether ideological differences moderate how threat (economic system threat) and uncertainty (outcome uncertainty about election) influence the perceived similarity between people's personal normative attitudes (how things should be) and their estimates of socially normative attitudes (what they believe others would say should be). Furthermore, the effect of the result of the election on beliefs about the legitimacy of the standing economic system among supporters of competing political parties was assessed in two studies using within-subjects design (US n = 80; UK n = 329). The findings support the hypothesis that ideology predicts differences in perception of the generalized other when faced with system threat and that people bolster their ideological commitments following threats to their worldview in form of electoral defeat. While liberals tend to overestimate the strength of conservative values within the society in general, conservatives view others as both more conservative and liberal compared to themselves.