Elections and Policy Development: Childcare Expansion in South Korea

• In Event: Childcare and the Politics of Parenthood in Advanced Economies

Abstract

Why does childcare expansion dominate the national political discourse in some advanced industrial countries while not in others? This question motivates this paper. It argues that institutional context of elections conditions whether or not a new social issue dominates the national political discourse. Two features of elections are particularly important: (i) winner-takes-all electoral rules; and (ii) the timing of local and national elections. When local and national elections are not held concurrently with enough intervals in winner-takes-all electoral systems, new social issues, such as childcare expansion, are more likely to emerge and dominate the national political discourse. Non-concurrent local elections with winner-takes-all electoral rules allow new issues to emerge and enough intervals between the local and national elections make the issues to trickle up to national political scene. This paper tests the framework by process-tracing South Korea’s childcare expansion from 1995 to 2017 using original datasets on political statements and media coverage along with existing survey datasets.

Author

• Tae Hyun Lim, Syracuse University