1. Introduction
How do voters distinguish qualified candidates from unqualified candidates? This is a
serious problem in the process of delegating power in democracies because of two kinds of
informational disadvantages. First, voters cannot fully know the competencies and
preferences of politicians. There is no public information about a politician which will
reveal the true state of the politician’s abilities or interests. Second, most voters do not have
incentives to collect, process, and remember all the information about politicians given
huge costs they have to pay during those processes. Considering these informational
constraints on voters’ ability to select “good types” of politicians, democratic delegation
through election seems problematic at best.
Recently, Lupia and McCubbins (1998) argued that limited information does not
prevent people from making reasoned choices if they have credible speakers.
1
Their
persuasion model contends that people can learn from others if they believe the speaker as
“trustworthy” and “knowledgeable.” This paper aims to test their model empirically in the
context of the 2000 Korean General Election.
The 2000 Korean election is appropriate to this project for two reasons. First, Korean
domestic NGOs played a role of a speaker to provide voters with critical information about
candidates’ types (“unqualified” or not). Second, partisan voters in Korea are easily
observed by the deep-rooted regional voting behaviors, which offer an unusual opportunity
to test the effect of persuasion under heterogeneous principals.
The purpose of this paper is to answer the following questions: Did voters perceive
1
Arthur Lupia and Mathew D. McCubbins, Democratic Dilemma: Can Citizens Learn What They Need to
Know? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998,
Convention