유권자의 선거관련 매체이용이 선거판세 인식과 전략적 투표행위에 미치는 효과에 관한 조사연구

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

There have been controversies around the influence of opinion polls on voter's decision making in terms of the bandwagon or underdog effect. Literature to date, however, does not successfully explain how these effects come out in actual voters' psychological process, nor does how media coverage of public opinion polls affect various strategic voting behavior, as is proposed in this study. The presumption underlying the banning of media coverage of public opinion polls during the electoral period should have been tested empirically, rather than simply assumed.
This study suggests a typology of strategic voting behaviors and tries to test hypotheses regarding, first, whether such voting behaviors predominate voters' psychological process when a majority candidate prevails rather than when no candidate prevail, and second, which one group among supporters of a majority candidate, those of minority candidates, and free-floaters, are more inclined to vote strategically than others.
To measure strategic voting behaviors, a set of questionnaire items are developed, regarding to test these hypotheses on the existence of and on the effect of voter's media use on these types of strategic voting. The questionnaire-survey is administrated to examine how people living in Pusan metropolitan area was chosen for sampling because an oppositional party predominated the whole electoral process here and accordingly all kinds of strategic voting behaviors were assumed to dominate voters' psychological processes.
Several interesting findings deserve to be noted shortly: First, overall patterns of strategic voting behaviors were not clear regardless of whether a strong majority candidate predominates the whole electoral process or not. This finding as well with the null effect of mass media use on the perception of who will win suggests that the legal ban on the media coverage of public opinion polls is of little use if any. Interpersonal channels, instead, were found to have effect on voters' perception of election turnover. Second, most results of testing hypotheses on strategic voting behaviors in three categories -- (1) supporters for the majority candidate, (2) those for minority candidates and, (3) free-floaters -- did not accord to what were generally assumed: avoid dead-vote and bandwagoning were greater with supporters for the majority candidate than others: and only two hypotheses regarding top-dog biting by free-floaters and spiral of silence by supporters for the minority candidates were significantly greater than others as are predicted by the research hypotheses. Third, results regarding the effect of media use on voting behaviors showed that all media uses encourage normative but discourage strategic voting behaviors.
In the sense that interpersonal communication resembles pathological process of the rumor-mill, disseminating information inaccurate and often manipulative by election campaigns, it is proposed that the results of opinion polls made public through mass media during the election period be seen better than that through interpersonal channels, possibly of lesser quality.