The 2022 South Korean Presidential Election and the Gender Divide among the Youth

The 2022 South Korean presidential election was the country’s most closely contested election since a democratic direct electoral system was initiated in 1987, with less than a 1 percent difference separating the two major candidates among 34 million votes cast. Despite some parallels with and continuities from previous elections, the 2022 election saw new voting alignments emerge based on one topic: gender equality. In this essay, we explain how and why gender became such a prominent issue during the 2022 election campaign, and how this affected voting patterns, especially among male and female voters in their twenties and thirties. Specifically, we argue that gendered voter behaviour during the election arose from rising anti-feminist sentiments among young men, and that the two main presidential candidates politicized the issue to maximize support from this group. This in turn triggered the consolidation of a young female voting bloc. Using an original survey conducted in January 2022 with an approximate nationally representative sample of 1,017 respondents, we identify two possible causes of rising anti-feminist sentiments among young men: the belief that women receive preferential treatment in employment opportunities and mandatory military service for men. In addition, through an embedded survey experiment run before the election, we proposed that political candidates with pro-gender messages would be less likely to receive support from young men, while candidates with anti-gender messages would be likely to receive more support; these projections were confirmed by the actual voting breakdowns of the recent election. The results suggest that the new administration must handle gender issues with extreme care to ensure that divergent perceptions of the gender divide do not become further polarized over the next few years, since such a development could very well fuel democratic deconsolidation in South Korea.