EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Living in Yesterday’s Terror: The Impact of Civil War Violence on the Post-War Election in South Korea

Jae Hyun Park

Terrorism and Political Violence, 2025, vol. 37, issue 4, 478-493

Abstract: To what extent does civil war violence affect voting behaviour after the war? Evidence from South Korea after the Korean War suggests that the voter’s support or denunciation of civil war violence perpetrators on election day depends on how well the perpetrator controls the context of violence after the war. Using an original precinct-level dataset of the occurrence of civil war violence and the results of the 1950–1954 general elections in South Korea, I find that civil war violence performed by the dominating perpetrator, the South Korean government, had little effect on their vote shares, while violence performed by the opposition had a significant effect on increasing the dominating perpetrator’s vote shares. By antagonising and repressing the victims of their violence as the enemy of the nation, the South Korean government empowered the victims of opposition violence while silencing those victimised by them during the war. It was only after the collapse of the Rhee regime in April 1960 that the civil war violence victims of the South Korean government could mobilise for emancipation.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09546553.2024.2311677 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:ftpvxx:v:37:y:2025:i:4:p:478-493

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/ftpv20

DOI: 10.1080/09546553.2024.2311677

Access Statistics for this article

Terrorism and Political Violence is currently edited by James Forest

More articles in Terrorism and Political Violence from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().

 
Page updated 2025-06-03
Handle: RePEc:taf:ftpvxx:v:37:y:2025:i:4:p:478-493