Voting intentions during the later stage of the COVID-19 pandemic: The roles of risk perception and performance evaluations in South Korea

Soo Yun Kim, Gyeongmin Kim, Seongoh Park, Cheonsoo Kim, Deok Hyun Jang, Dong-Hee Joe and Won Mo Jang

PLOS ONE, 2026, vol. 21, issue 4, 1-14

Abstract: In this study, we examine voting intentions during the later stage of the COVID-19 pandemic in relation to risk perceptions and performance evaluations. Although prior research has documented rally-around-the-flag effects during the early phase of the pandemic, less is known about how vote choice is structured once acute crisis conditions have waned. This study draws on a nationally representative survey conducted in South Korea around the March 2022 presidential election. The analysis examines associations between affective and cognitive risk perceptions, evaluations of the government’s COVID-19 countermeasures, overall government approval, economic evaluations and expectations, and voting intention. The results show that cognitive risk perception was associated with voting intention to a limited degree, whereas affective risk perception was not. More importantly, voting intentions were associated with conventional performance evaluations—overall government approval and economic evaluations and expectations—alongside pandemic-response approval, rather than being explained solely by the latter. This study addresses the need to better understand electoral behavior during the later phase of a prolonged crisis, a period that has received far less scholarly attention than the acute onset of the pandemic.

Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0345621 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 45621&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0345621

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0345621

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().