Gidong Kim

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Welcome! I am Gidong Kim, a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at the University of Missouri. I am a 2022-2023 Graduate Fellow at Institute for Korean Studies at the University of Missouri. I hold a M.A. and B.A. in Political Science from Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (HUFS), Seoul, South Korea.

I study comparative political behavior and political economy - especially, nationalism and identity politics, voting and elections, inequality and redistribution preferences. Specifically, I'm interested in the interaction between nationalism and economic perception and preferences. I study how national sentiments shape individuals' economic perception such as economic evaluation, subjective class perception, inequality perception and redistribution preferences, and ultimately affects political behavior. Regionally, I focus on South Korea and East Asia while also conducting comparative studies.

My dissertation, "Nationalism and Redistribution in New Democracies: Nationalist Legacies of Authoritarian Regimes," investigates the micro-level underpinnings that sustain weak welfare system in developmental states. I argue that because authoritarian leaders who encounter twin challenges of nation-building and modernization tend to utilize nationalism as an effective ruling and mobilizing strategy for national development, nationalism shaped under the authoritarianism can embed developmentalism as social norms, which can powerfully shape individuals' political attitudes including redistribution preferences even after democratization. I empirically test my theoretical argument using a mixed-method approach including in-depth interview, survey experiment, and cross-national survey data analysis.