Another Look at Partisan Polarization in the South Korean Mass Public: Ideological or Affective Polarization?

This study attempts to provide an alternative perspective that explains why the degree of ideological conflict looms large in Korean people’s perception. I argue here that people tend to feel contemporary Korean society is suffering from severe ideological conflict not because ordinary citizens became ideologically polarized, rather because a kind of emotional antipathy has substantially grown among partisans in Korea. That is, drawing upon a social identity theory developed in social psychology, this study suggests that people tend to perceive the level of ideological confrontation among citizens larger than it actually is because the extent to which partisans dislike each other has significantly grown in Korea. This implies that affect-based partisan division could be another way of defining mass attitudinal polarization in contemporary South Korean political landscape.