Youngbin (Ben) Kim

Layered Memory: Priming Colonial and Wartime Trauma

Survey Experiment in South Korea

To recover the individual-level mechanisms behind the observational findings, I designed a nationally representative survey experiment in South Korea (n = 2,000) that primes colonial memory, wartime memory, or both. The instrument, vignettes, and pre-analysis plan are complete, and the survey is scheduled for fielding in fall 2026.

Memory in Motion: Trauma, Transmission, and Cleavage Formation

Agent-Based Modeling

This chapter formalizes how traumatic memory is transmitted across generations and space, and under what conditions it hardens into a durable political cleavage. The model is complete and will be run with priors taken from the survey experiment rather than arbitrary starting values, so that the simulated dynamics rest on experimentally derived parameters and carry greater external validity than a model seeded at random.

Political Ideology and Perceptions of Mental Illness

with Christopher Ojeda and Victoria Davis. Under review at Perspectives on Politics

Do liberals and conservatives see mental illness differently? Using the General Social Survey mental health vignette module, we examine how political ideology shapes beliefs about the causes of, labels for, and appropriate treatments for conditions ranging from major depression to schizophrenia, and show that ideological divides in health beliefs extend well beyond policy into the perception of illness itself.

Do Online Petitions Frame Public Perceptions? An Association Rule Mining Analysis on Yemeni Refugees in South Korea

with Jingyeong Song and Awais Khan. Under review at Information Polity

How do citizen petition platforms frame contested issues? Analyzing 1,310 petitions submitted to the South Korean presidential petition system following the 2018 arrival of Yemeni refugees on Jeju, we apply association rule mining to the co-occurrence of terms and find that petitions constructed a negative frame tightly linking refugees to security threats and economic burdens rather than humanitarian concerns.

Empathetic Grounds: How Land Claim Shapes Outsider Support and Justifies Actions in Conflict

Solo-authored

How does a claim to land shape the support of outside observers for parties in conflict? Study 1, a pre-registered vignette experiment (n = 1,986), finds that a land claim shifts support, perceived legitimacy, and perceived victimhood strongly toward the claimant. Study 2, pre-registered and awaiting fielding, tests whether these effects persist after fact-checking and traces their emotional and behavioral echoes.

Korean Free Economic Zones and Regional Unemployment: Application of Generalized Synthetic Control

with Raymond Kim

Do place-based development policies deliver on their employment promises? Using the staggered designation of Korean Free Economic Zones, we apply generalized synthetic control to estimate their effect on regional unemployment relative to counterfactual trajectories built from non-designated regions.

Cross-National Evidence on Ideology and Physical Health Perceptions

with Christopher Ojeda and Victoria Davis

Are beliefs about the causes of physical health politically polarized? Using ISSP data from 20 countries across the 2011 and 2021 waves, we show that conservatives emphasize individual causes such as behavior and genes while liberals emphasize structural causes such as poverty, a pattern that holds across most country units, and we develop a theory of where and why this divide emerges.

Military Counterbalancing and State Repression: An Empirical Investigation

with Sung Min Yun and Shimaa Hanafy

Do parallel armed forces built to protect regimes from their own militaries also make those regimes more repressive? Using a cross-national panel of 108 countries from 1961 to 2011 and Iran's IRGC as a motivating case, we test whether counterbalancing is associated with higher levels of state repression.

Introduction to Comparative Politics

Instructor of Record (Summer 2026)

I designed the syllabus, lecture content, assignments, and course structure for this introductory course at UC Merced.

Advanced Analysis of Political Data

Computer Lab TA (Fall 2025, Fall 2026)

I design and run the computer lab for the department's advanced quantitative methods course. Each week or biweekly, students work through self-guided R materials I wrote, building from data import and cleaning through visualization to coding OLS regression from the ground up. The lab concludes with students presenting an original research question analyzed with observational data.

Teaching Assistant

• Political Behavior Around the World (Spring 2025)
• Introduction to American Politics (Fall 2023, Fall 2024)
• Voting Behavior, Campaigns, and Elections (Spring 2024)
• Authoritarian Politics (Spring 2023)
• Causes of International Conflict (Fall 2022)