Communication Faculty Publications
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
4-1-2026
Abstract
In this study, we examine voting intentions during the later stage of the COVID-19 pandemic in relation to risk perceptions and performance evaluations. Although prior research has documented rally-around-the-flag effects during the early phase of the pandemic, less is known about how vote choice is structured once acute crisis conditions have waned. This study draws on a nationally representative survey conducted in South Korea around the March 2022 presidential election. The analysis examines associations between affective and cognitive risk perceptions, evaluations of the government’s COVID-19 countermeasures, overall government approval, economic evaluations and expectations, and voting intention. The results show that cognitive risk perception was associated with voting intention to a limited degree, whereas affective risk perception was not. More importantly, voting intentions were associated with conventional performance evaluations—overall government approval and economic evaluations and expectations—alongside pandemic-response approval, rather than being explained solely by the latter. This study addresses the need to better understand electoral behavior during the later phase of a prolonged crisis, a period that has received far less scholarly attention than the acute onset of the pandemic.
Recommended Citation
Kim, Soo Yun, et al. "Voting intentions during the later stage of the COVID-19 pandemic: The roles of risk perception and performance evaluations in South Korea." PLoS One 21.4 (2026): e0345621. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0345621
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Publication Title
PLoS One
DOI
10.1371/journal.pone.0345621
Comments
© 2026 Kim et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.