Youngbin (Ben) Kim
Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science, University of California, Merced
I study the politics of adversity and victimhood: how histories of trauma shape who is seen as a victim, and how those perceptions carry into political engagement and the democratic process. My work draws on original archival data, survey experiments, and computational models.
Research Curriculum Vitae
About
My name is Youngbin Kim (김영빈, 金榮彬), and I go by Ben in English.
Research. My dissertation asks how a single polity remembers more than one historical trauma at once. Drawing on original archival data from South Korea on Japanese colonial forced labor and Korean War civilian killings, it combines spatial analysis of election returns, a nationally representative survey experiment, and an agent-based model of memory transmission. Beyond the dissertation, I have a broad interest in the Korean case and in comparative politics more generally, with several projects in progress on these fronts, and I am developing new work at the intersection of political psychology and AI.
Outside research. Languages are my longest-running hobby: Japanese since middle school, Arabic as a college minor, Hebrew from an exchange year in Israel, some Mandarin, and now Spanish. I have traveled to 22 countries and hold the Korean government's certification as an English-speaking tour guide, so if you are planning a trip to Korea, please ask. I also produce and DJ progressive house sets, follow K-pop (RESCENE and NMIXX whenever they play in California), lift weights, and run 5K regularly.
Research
Dissertation
Job Market Paper
Using an original township-level dataset built from Japanese colonial forced-labor conscription rosters (National Archives of Korea) and Korean War civilian killing records (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Korea), I harmonize administrative boundaries from 1945 onward and estimate how local exposure to each trauma shapes presidential voting across six elections (2002–2025). The results show that the perpetrator identity of a trauma, rather than its magnitude, determines whether and how it registers politically, and that colonial and wartime traumas leave separable rather than compounding traces.
Job Market Paper Draft (PDF)Survey Experiment
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
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.
Under Review
- Christopher Ojeda, Youngbin Kim, & Victoria Davis. "Political Ideology and Perceptions of Mental Illness." Perspectives on Politics.
- Jingyeong Song, Youngbin Kim, & Awais Khan. "Do Online Petitions Frame Public Perceptions? An Association Rule Mining Analysis on Yemeni Refugees in South Korea." Information Polity.
Working Papers
Empathetic Grounds
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.
Draft (Forthcoming)Korean Free Economic Zones and Regional Unemployment
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.
Draft (Forthcoming)Cross-National Evidence on Ideology and Physical Health Perceptions
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.
Draft (Forthcoming)Military Counterbalancing and State Repression
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.
Draft (Forthcoming)Peer-Reviewed Publications
- Youngbin Kim & Seunghoon Paik. (2022). "US-China Strategic Competition and its Implication on the Changes of Threat Perception in Israel-Middle East Diplomatic Relations." Korean Journal of the Middle Eastern Affairs, 21(1), 1–34.
- Jingyeong Song, Youngbin Kim, & Seunghoon Paik. (2022). "Migrants as the Threat of Terrorism?: An Analysis on the Korean Perception toward Migrants." Korean Journal of National Defense Studies, 65(1), 85–110.
- Youngbin Kim & Seunghoon Paik. (2021). "The Coalition Government in a Multiparty Knesset Democracy in Israel: An Analysis of the Coalition Government of Lapid-Bennett." Korean Journal of the Middle Eastern Affairs, 20(2), 33–66.
Teaching
Instructor of Record
I designed the syllabus, lecture content, assignments, and course structure for this introductory course at UC Merced.
Syllabus Weekly Writing RubricComputer Lab Instructor
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.
Lab Syllabus Lab Material (Sample)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
Media
Political Issues
- Jan 21, 2025Trump's second term beginsWhat a new four-year term means for Koreans living in the United States. Watch
- May 6, 2025Student visa cancellationsSpeaking as a directly affected international student on the mood on campus and the subsequent reinstatement of visas. Watch
- Jun 9, 2025Harvard and the legal status of international studentsOn the administration's move against Harvard and its implications for students' legal standing. Watch
Academic and Teaching Issues
- Nov 23, 2025AI and academic dishonestyOn how generative AI is changing cheating and how instructors are responding. Watch