Do Political Parties Represent Voters’ Preference? A Clustering Analysis of Korea’s Local Election of 2018

We employ the results of a survey conducted on two thousand voters that have participated in Korean local election of 2018 to perform clustering analysis of Korean voters’ preferences. We attempt to test the hypothesis of these preferences being adequately represented by the five major political parties. We find that there was likely a significant mismatch between Korean voters and the five voting camps identified under the assumption of five being an optimal number of the voting clusters. After relaxing this assumption we found that the optimal number of voting camps in Korea is two or three, suggesting that a two or a tri-partite political party system would have been a more adequate match representing Korean voters’ preferences in 2018.