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Going the American way: the surprising case of Korean pro -Americanism

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 25; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09512748.2012.658846

1470-1332

Giacomo Chiozza, Ajin Choi,

Electoral Systems and Political Participation

Abstract Despite many predictions to the contrary, the Republic of Korea (ROK) is currently one of the countries with most pro-American attitudes. We investigate what is behind the extraordinary resilience in US popular standing in an allegedly least likely setting. Using survey data from 2002 and 2007 and a novel methodology, Classification and Regression Tree models, we test whether US standing is: (1) a matter of interests, i.e. a reward that the USA receives because it either provides security or international public goods; or (2) whether it is a matter of image, i.e. the recognition that the USA is a role model to emulate. We find that across a large number of predictors, the Korean public mostly liked the USA because they liked American ways of doing business, which gives support to the image hypothesis. Security interests played a secondary role in shaping US standing, while the provision of international public goods had no impact in the popular assessment of the USA in the ROK. Keywords: anti-AmericanismUS–ROK allianceUS standingpublic opinionCART models Acknowledgements We thank Chung Min Lee and James Lee Ray for comments and suggestions. Ajin Choi would like to thank the International Security Program, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School for supporting her research. This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2010-013-B00003). Mistakes, omissions and other assorted infelicities are our own responsibility. Notes 1. Interestingly, some of the key evidence for Pape's (2005: 21–4) argument comes from an assessment of the US image through public opinion data. 2. For an illustration of the conventional view that anti-American sentiments contributed to President Roh's election, see Kim and Lim (2007: 72); for a challenge to the conventional view see Jhee (Citation2008: 314–6) and Horowitz and Kim (2008: 258). 3. This assessment is based upon the size of the economy in 2005 as measured by the Gross National Income data in current US converted using the World Bank Atlas method (World Bank 2007: 14–7, Table 1.1). 4. We describe the models in detail in the Appendix. Here suffice it to say that these models offer a graphical representation of the most likely combinations of factors that explain the variation on the dependent variable and are ordered according to their level of relevance. Variables with no explanatory power do not appear in the tree sequences. For a popular press example, see the New York Times on 16 April 2008; accessed at http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/04/16/us/20080416_OBAMA_GRAPHIC.html?scp=1&sq=%22decision%20tree%22& st=cse, 30 January 2012. 5. The coding of the variables is presented in detail in Appendix 1. 6. The total number of Korean respondents in the 2007 wave of the Global Attitudes Project survey was 718. Thus, about 66.7 per cent of the survey respondents (479 out of 718) are classified under the terminal node reached from the first split measuring opinions of the US ways of doing business. 7. The total number of Korean respondents in the 2002 wave of the Global Attitudes Project survey was 719. Thus, about 63.3 per cent of the survey respondents (455 out of 719) are classified under the terminal node reached from the first split measuring opinions of the US ways of doing business.