Crisis and partisan bias: Economic evaluations during South Korea's COVID-19 downturn

How do citizens attribute blame in the wake of government failure? Does partisanship bias these attributions? While partisan cues may serve as useful guides when citizens are evaluating public policies, those cues are likely to be less informative and more distortionary when evaluating government performance regarding a crisis. We address these questions by examining blame attributions to government appointees for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. We implement an experimental design in a nationally representative survey that builds on previous work in two ways: (1) we manipulate party labels for the same officials in a real-world setting by considering appointees who were nominated at different times by presidents of different parties; and (2) we examine how domain relevance moderates partisan bias. We find that partisan bias in attributions is strongest when officials are domain relevant, a finding that has troubling implications for representative democracy.

Who do citizens blame for the recent European economic crisis? In this paper, we test theories about blame attribution with respect to the economic crisis. We argue that blame for the crisis is partially conditioned by partisan bias and framings of the crisis as being related to globalization. We test the argument with new survey data and a survey experiment from Spain. In the experiment, respondents receive different framings of the economic crisis which are endorsed by different political parties and non-partisan organizations. We obtain the following findings: (i) blame for who is responsible for the economic crisis is greatly affected by partisanship; (ii) making globalization as a cause of the crisis salient exonerates the government of blame, but only for co-partisans of the government; and (iii) citizens are willing to blame other globalization-related factors for the crisis, in particular, European governments and blame the domestic government less. The results expand our understanding of public opinion dynamics during major economic recessions and also suggest conditions under which “scapegoating” globalization can occur.

The use of economic evaluation in decision making appears to have increased over the past few years and economic evaluation is looked upon as another measure to help contain costs and improve efficiency in an evidence-based decision-making environment. Following the examples of Australia and the Canadian Province of Ontario, four European Union (EU) countries (Finland, the Netherlands, Portugal, and the United Kingdom) have recently introduced economic evaluation guidelines. In addition to the Australian and Canadian guidelines, which constitute a hurdle to reimbursement, the paradigm that seems to be evolving in the four EU countries follows a similar route. Finland and the Netherlands seem to be moving toward the notion of a fourth hurdle to reimbursement, whereas the National Institute for Clinical Excellence in England and Wales was in principle meant to influence practice, although in reality this essentially acts as a hurdle to reimbursement, requiring a different data set to that used by regulatory authorities. Whereas the Portuguese guidelines were developed to assist in preparing economic submissions to support reimbursement decisions, they are unclear about when such evidence will be required and also discuss the dissemination of economic evidence to broader audiences. The introduction of these guidelines poses a number of challenges to policy makers, the implications of which are analyzed in the paper: a) to ensure that economic evaluations are carried out scientifically without industrial or political bias; b) to define an acceptable methodology that would increase their credibility; and c) to address certain practical issues ranging from deciding how to use economic evaluations in policy making to setting up new institutions or improving the coordination and dissemination of evidence. The variation in the use of economic evaluation guidelines in the four EU countries highlights the differences in national pharmaceutical policies and is in line with policy makers' continuous attempts to contain costs. While the paper critically discusses the guidelines, it also points out that a series of methodologic issues need to be addressed if economic criteria are to be introduced in policy making with the aim to improve resource allocation. The paper concludes that economic evaluation as a discipline is beginning to impact on policy, whereas the consistent use of economic evaluation results is, in principle, being adopted by policy makers but needs to go a step further to reach practitioners.

In this article, I present a partisan theory of agency enforcement and empirically investigate the possibility of partisan bias in the enforcement of the federal securities laws. Leveraging plausibly exogenous shocks to partisan control of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), I find evidence that a firm’s partisan alignment with the SEC substantially reduces the likelihood of enforcement. For a firm that is ex ante equally likely to be targeted for enforcement or not, my estimates indicate that a typical increase in partisan alignment following a change in party control of the SEC reduces the likelihood of enforcement by over 19%. Partisan alignment also appears to reduce aggregate monetary sanctions, though these estimates are less certain. By contrast, I find little evidence of partisan bias in the initial opening of investigations. These findings suggest there may be meaningful partisan bias in SEC enforcement and have important implications for democratic governance. (JEL D73, K22, K23, K41, K42, P00)

Early Response to COVID-19

The East Asian democracies (EAD) of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have received little attention from the international political science community working on populism. By analyzing the last two to three decades of research on EAD we look for clues to help us explain why there is so little interest. In our review we encounter cases of eclectic conceptualization, suboptimal data, innovative categorization, binary analytics, and even political bias, all of which may weaken the persuasiveness of the respective research in the eyes of critical colleagues. Our key finding, however, is that all studies on EAD implicitly refer to local political standards as the baseline from which alleged populist behavior is identified and labeled. In direct comparison, the populist characteristics of East Asian politicians appear to be less pronounced than those of sledgehammer populists like Donald Trump, Hugo Chavez, or Boris Johnson. Consequently, scholars working on the latter may be less curious about the former. Our findings, therefore, confront us with the question of what to use as a baseline for the measurement of potentially populist phenomena. We argue for the application of what is locally considered standard political behavior and conclude that such a practice has the potential to draw more attention to cases from Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

As the use of digital news services increases, service providers recommend news articles based on readers’ interests and preferences. In this study, we analyzed the differences in news diversity, the number of political news articles, and the political bias of personalized news compared to non-personalized news, focusing on Naver News and Kakao News, Korea’s representative news aggregators. Additionally, we investigated whether readers’ political orientation affects the political bias of personalized news. Through a survey company, we recruited 299 adults aged 20 to 59 who had used Internet news portals for at least 10 min daily over the past month. An online survey was conducted to measure demographic variables, news usage, political orientation, and an online quasi-experiment was carried out to examine the news articles provided to them through Internet news portals in both logged-in and logged-out states. The results indicated that personalized news has lower content diversity, higher source diversity, and provides fewer political news articles compared to non-personalized news. In the case of Naver News, personalized news was more neutral in terms of coverage and statement bias than non-personalized news. Furthermore, news readers’ political orientation did not have a statistically significant effect on the coverage and statement bias of personalized news. Before the introduction of personalized news, Internet news portals in South Korea were suspected of being politically biased. The results of this study suggested that personalized algorithms did not provide more politically biased news articles than conventional news delivery systems and did not cause filter bubbles.

본 연구는 제21대 국회의원선거에서 대통령의 코로나 대응 평가를 사례로, 유권자의 회고적 투표 행태를 경험적으로 검증한다. 더불어민주당의 압승으로 귀결된 선거 결과가 대통령의 코로나 대응이 효과적이었기 때문이었다는 평가를 재고하고자, 유권자들의 당파적 편향을 고려하여 회고적 투표 선택을 보다 면밀하게 고찰한다. 분석의 결과, 대통령의 코로나 대응에 대한 평가, 그리고 평가가 긍정적일수록 더불어민주당을 선택하는 확률이 높아진 이면에는 유권자들의 당파적 선호가 영향을 미치는 것으로 나타났다. 대통령의 코로나 대응 평가는 유권자의 정당일체감에 따라 차이를 보였다. 그리고 특정한 정당을 지지하는 유권자들은 대통령의 코로나 대응 평가에 관계없이 선호하는 정당 및 소속 후보를 선택하였다. 본 연구의 분석은 더불어민주당의 압승이 코로나에 대한 대통령과 정부의 효과적인 대응을 넘어서서, 유권자의 정파적 지형에 의한 결과였음을 나타내고 있다.

The literature on economic voting starts from the assumptions that citizens have a sufficiently high level of knowledge about their country’s economic situation, and that they vote according to their perception of the state of the economy. However, these assumptions have been challenged as economic perceptions could be plagued by partisan bias. We use the comparative dataset of the European Social Survey to investigate partisan bias in the perception of economic performance. Firstly, we observe that the economic perceptions of both supporters and opponents of governing parties are strongly related to real-life economic indicators such as gross domestic product growth and unemployment levels. Secondly, we find that shifts in economic performance (growth and unemployment) are strongly associated with similar changes in economic perceptions among both supporters of governing parties and opposition parties. There is, however, a significant but limited partisan bias in economic perceptions in countries with high levels of unemployment.

PCN87 Key Clinical and Economic Rationales for Oncology Reviews in South Korea

South Korea formally adopted economic evaluation in December 2006 to aid drug reimbursement decision-making. While this policy change is applied only to pharmaceuticals, it has also sparked interest in economic evaluations for non-pharmaceutical interventions and programmes. This study aimed to provide a snapshot of the current practice for published health economic evaluation studies and critically assess the quality of these studies. An electronic search was performed on multiple databases (EMBASE, PubMed, NHS Economic Evaluation Database, Scopus, Korean Medical database, Korean studies Information Service System, and Research Information Sharing Service) to identify health economic evaluation studies published between January 2007 and December 2019. The inclusion criteria were peer-reviewed, original health economic evaluations (cost-utility, cost-effectiveness, cost-minimisation, and cost-benefit analyses) published in English or Korean. Two reviewers selected studies for inclusion and extracted data from the included studies. Key characteristics of these studies were descriptively summarised, and study quality was assessed using the Quality of Health Economic Studies (QHES) instrument on a 100-point scale. A total of 162 studies were included in this review (63 for drugs, 51 for non-pharmaceutical treatments/health technologies, and 48 for health programmes). These numbers confirm a significant increase in the number ofpublications since the policy introduction. However, the quality of these studies remained relatively low, with a mean QHES score of 57.9 (± 16.0). Study quality also varied substantially, with the QHES scores ranging from 15 to 87. The scores were notably lower in studies with non-pharmaceutical interventions and programmes, cost-effectiveness analyses or cost-benefit analyses, retrospective study-based or simple modelling-based analyses, and those locally published. In addition, a considerable proportion of these studies did not state or specify essential components of economic evaluation, such as perspectives (30.2%), time horizons (29.6%), discount rates (34.6%), and sensitivity analyses (24.7%). While the use of local data either fully or partially was relatively higher for unit costs (94.4%) and resource utilisation (90.1%), it was lower for utility weights (47.1%), treatment effects (63.0%), and baseline risks (70.4%). Transferability or generalisability issues were infrequently discussed when relying on foreign sources. In addition, the included studies were often not well structured, making it difficult to assess their quality. These findings suggest that there is still much room for improving the quality of health economic evaluation studies conducted in South Korea. Policymakers should critically evaluate available cost-effectiveness evidence, especially for non-pharmaceutical interventions and programmes, when using it for decision-making in South Korea.

The East Asian model of economic development focuses on 5 shared characteristics that seem significant in the contemporary economic development of Japan Taiwan and Korea. They are economic characteristics and include 1) high investment ratios 2) small public sectors 3) competitive labor markets 4) export expansion and 5) government intervention in the economy. Large and efficient investments in human capital and well-developed capacities to absorb new technology are 2 other economic features shared by The Three. One could add overcrowding (high man/land ratios) and scarcity of natural resources though these are handicaps rather than sources of economic strength. It is possible however that virtue springs from necessity and that ample arable land or abundant natural resources mainly permit governments to postpone the difficult decisions needed to promote development rather than provide the wherewithal needed to finance development. Other noneconomic characteristics of The Three such as ethnic and linguistic homogeneity relatively compact geography manageable population size and the Confucian tradition have not been considered in the model even though they have undoubtedly influenced labor productivity savings behavior and other aspects of economic performance. Whether the East Asian model ought to be followed depends on whether current and foreseeable circumstances are sufficiently like those faced by The Three to justify using the same policies that they used. Applicability of the East Asian model should also depend on whether the strategy employed by The Three has been responsible for their economic success. 2 aspects of the East Asian models policy features are noteworthy: 1) the policies typically work by influencing rather than replacing private market decisions and 2) the public expects government to intervene to influence economic growth.

To paint a fuller picture of economic voters, we combine personal income records with a representative election survey. We examine three central topics in the economic voting literature: pocketbook versus sociotropic voting, the effects of partisanship on economic evaluations, and voter myopia. First, we show that voters who appear in survey data to be voting based on the national economy are, in fact, voting equally on the basis of their personal financial conditions. Second, there is strong evidence of both partisan bias and economic information in economic evaluations, but personal economic data is required to separate the two. Third, although in experiments and aggregate historical data recent economic conditions appear to drive vote choice, we find no evidence of myopia when we examine actual personal economic data.

While political accountability requires that voters can form an accurate picture of government performance, public evaluations of government performance in established democracies are often distorted by partisan considerations. We test whether the same factors bias evaluations of government performance in a new democracy where partisanship is less stable and defined. This analysis estimates individual-level models of retrospective national economic evaluations in South Korea’s 2017 presidential election. South Korea has unstable party politics, low levels of party institutionalization, and high levels of public distrust in political parties. Yet even in this context we find that voters’ economic evaluations are significantly affected by political loyalties such as party identification. This endogeneity is sufficiently large that it results in aggregate consumer evaluations of the economy that systematically vary across regions depending upon the relationship of the president to that region. The findings confirm that party identification shapes citizen opinions even in a context where its effect would likely be weak.

Internationalization of Korean banks during crises: The network view of learning and commitment