Political Funds in Elections: An Analysis of the Determinants of Political Funds in the 19th National Assembly Election in Korea

Abstract

What are the factors that affect the amount of political funds available to candidates in Korean National Assembly Elections? Using the National Election Commission’s official political finance data for the 19th National Assembly Election, the paper tries to answer this question. The results based on bivariate statistical analysis show that whether a candidates ran in a rural district or not, whether he won the election or not, whether he had previously won any election or not, whether he belonged to the regional hegemonic parties or not, which ranking he had in terms of votes won and to which party he belonged all made, as expected, statistically significant differences. But the results based on the multivariate regression analysis using candidate’s share of the vote as the proxy for his prospect of winning show that once the number of towns and population of the electoral districts are controlled whether a candidate ran in a rural district or not no longer made statistically significant difference. The results also show that candidate’s share of the vote was most important among independent variables that were included in the analysis. In addition, the results show that as candidate’s share of the vote increased, his political funds in case when he had previously won any election and/or belonged to the regional hegemonic parties increased less steeply than in case when he had neither won any election nor belonged to the regional hegemonic parties or even decreased.