South Korea’s Huge Gender Divide Among Young Voters. NewsWire

NewsWire: 4/14/22

• Young men propelled South Korean president-elect Yoon Suk-yul to victory. A large majority of male voters in their 20s and 30s voted for Yoon, while the majority of young women preferred his progressive opponent. (Nikkei Asia)
  
• NH: Yoon Suk-yul, South Korea’s new president, won last month’s election by just 0.73%, the closest-ever margin in a Korean presidential race. He owes his victory, in large part, to strong support among young men.
• The overall election results by age reflected a U-shaped pattern that has been long-standing in Korean politics. Koreans under 40 were evenly divided between candidates. Middle-aged South Koreans, especially those in their 40s, strongly favored Yoon’s progressive opponent, Lee Jae-myung. And voters over 60 favored the conservative Yoon by margins that were just as large, if not larger. These preferences are generational: South Korea’s Gen Xers led the pro-democracy movement in the 1980s that overthrew the decades-long authoritarian regime that older Boomers associate with rapid economic growth.

• But when we look at both age and gender, a very different pattern emerges. Among the oldest Korean voters, the large overall tilt toward more conservative candidates is accompanied by little difference in preference between older men and older women. Among Millennials, on the other hand, the pattern is reversed. Under age 40, South Korean voters are just about evenly split between conservatives and progressives. But there is a huge gap between the preferences of young men and young women. Fully 58.7% of 18- to 29-year-old men voted for Yoon, while only 36.3% voted for Lee. Young men’s level of support for Yoon was nearly as high as that of retirement-age men, the usual base of Korean conservatives.
• Among 18- to 29-year-old women, these figures were basically reversed: 58.0% of women voted for Lee and 33.8% for Yoon. The gap between men and women voting for Yoon was 25 percentage points. Among those in their 30s, the gender differences was less dramatic but still significant. 30-something men preferred Yoon by about 10 percentage points and their female counterparts preferred Lee by about 5 percentage points. 

• Millennial voters in the United States are well-known for having a very large gender gap in party preference. But it's not as large as what just happened in South Korea. In the 2020 election, for example, the U.S. gap in support for Biden between 18- to 29-year-old men and women was 15 percentage points. In South Korea, we're looking at an extra ten percentage points!
• In February, we wrote about how South Korea's rising anti-feminist movement had taken center stage in the election. Many young men have come to see policies intended to help women as a threat amid fierce competition for jobs and few opportunities to get ahead. At the same time, more young women are rejecting the country's rigid gender expectations for marriage and motherhood. (See “Rising Anti-Feminism Among South Korea’s Young Men.”) Yoon appealed strongly to anti-feminist men, calling for the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family to be abolished on the grounds that it’s “no longer necessary” and blaming South Korea’s rock-bottom birthrate on feminism.
• To be sure, feminism wasn’t the only issue that voters weighed in on in this election. Both campaigns were marked by mudslinging and scandals, and young voters were especially unhappy with the incumbent progressive party’s failure to curb surging housing prices. But the enormous gender gap among young voters does suggest it was indeed his anti-feminist stance that put Yoon over the top--and that ensures that South Korea’s already-large gender divide will only deepen from here.
• In the week after the election, Lee's Democratic Party gained some 39,000 new members. Fully 72% were women; among those ages 20-39, this share rose to 80%. More than half of these new members were under 40. We don't have comparable numbers for Yoon's People Power Party, but if the voting results are any indication, it's probably the mirror image: a surge in young male members.