Sung Eun Kim

Associate Professor
Political Science and International Relations
Korea University

Email: sung_kim@korea.ac.kr

I am an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Korea University. During the academic year 2024–5, I was a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard-Yenching Institute.

My research focuses on the international political economy, with a particular interest in the intersection of domestic politics and international trade. My previous and ongoing work delves into topics such as public attitudes and electoral responses to trade policy as well as China's foreign economic strategies, particularly its trade and foreign aid policies. I am also interested in the political economy of environment and energy, especially public opinion toward environmental politics. My work is forthcoming or has appeared in American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, International Organization, Journal of Politics and British Journal of Political Science among others.

Before joining Korea University, I was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the National University of Singapore. I received my BA in Political Science and International Relations and Communications and my MA in Political Science and International Relations from Korea University. I received my PhD in Political Science with distinction from Columbia University in 2016.

Recent Publications

Geography of Grievance: Industrial Hubs Magnify Political Discontent (with Krzysztof Pelc)
International Organization, 2026

Abstract

Why do some economic shocks have political consequences, upturning elections and ushering in radical candidates, while others are brushed off as structural change? We address this puzzle by looking to geographically concentrated industries, and how they relate to regional identity. While most often presented as a source of regional strength, we show that industrial hubs in the United States have accounted for more job losses than gains over the last twenty years. We then show how this matters through three original survey studies. Workers in geographically concentrated industries belong to denser, more deeply-rooted peer networks; these are associated with a stronger view that politicians are responsible for preventing layoffs. Those same individuals also perceive economic shocks of equal magnitude as more damaging to their region's standing, compared to the rest of the country. Perceptions of lost regional standing, in turn, are associated with greater demand for populist leadership traits. Finally, we show how these individual attitudes translate into aggregate political behavior. Employment losses in industrial hubs are tied to greater support for Republican candidates, while equivalent losses in non-hubs show no analogous effect. Our account presents a competing picture to the dominant narrative of industrial hubs as founts of innovation and productivity. When threatened by structural forces, such hubs can turn instead into founts of political resentment.

Publisher Page PDF

The Politics of Rejection: Explaining Chinese Import Refusals (with Rebecca L. Perlman & Grace Zeng)
American Journal of Political Science, 2025, 69(2): 438–454

Abstract

Health and safety standards offer a convenient means by which governments can claim to be protecting the population, even while pursuing more parochial goals. In the realm of international trade, such standards have most often been studied as a means of veiled protectionism. Yet precisely because health and safety standards create ambiguity about their intent, nations may seek to use them for goals that extend well beyond protecting domestic industry. We theorize that governments will, at times, enforce regulations in ways intended to exact political retribution. To show this, we collect original data on import refusals by Chinese border inspectors between 2011 and 2019. Though ostensibly intended to keep dangerous products out of the hands of Chinese consumers, we demonstrate that import refusals have systematically been used by the Chinese government as a way to punish states that act against China's interest.

Publisher Page

Target, Information, and Trade Preferences: Evidence from Survey Experiment in East Asia (with Jong Hee Park, Inbok Rhee and Joonseok Yang)
American Journal of Political Science, 2023, 67(4): 898–914

Abstract

Protectionist measures often have target countries, and public support for such measures depends on who the targets are. We identify such target effects on protectionist sentiments and examine the effects of information in tempering protectionist sentiments in East Asia. Using an original survey experiment in China, Japan, and South Korea, we test how providing information about the costs of protectionism changes public attitudes toward targeted protectionist measures. We found that providing a target country identity increased public support for protectionism by 8.6%. Providing cost information, on the other hand, reduces support for protectionism by 10%. We also found that information and target effects persist in the presence of the other: Receiving cost information reduces support for both general and targeted protectionism but does not necessarily mute the target effect. Similarly, when reputation and retaliation costs are associated with protectionism, knowing a target country identity still increases public support for protectionism.

Publisher Page

Who Votes for Free Trade and When? Geopolitics as the Sources of Legislative Preferences (with Joonseok Yang)
Review of International Political Economy, 2023, 30(6): 2257–2284

Abstract

Why do legislators support some free trade agreements but oppose others? Despite a wide variation in legislative support for free trade agreements, the heterogeneous preferences of legislators have received little attention in the literature, which largely focuses on general trade policy preferences of legislators and individual voters. We bring in geopolitical factors as a key source of legislative preferences on specific free trade agreements. Using voting records of the U.S. House representatives on all major bills related to free trade agreements, we find that the geostrategic importance of potential trading partner has a substantial effect on voting for trade agreements. We find that legislators become less sensitive to their constituents' economic interests when considering trade agreements with allies or countries with closely aligned interests. This highlights the importance of examining security externalities of trade cooperation.

Publisher Page

Buying Influence? Rotating Leadership in ASEAN and Allocation of Chinese Foreign Aid (with Taegyun Lim)
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, 2023, 23(2): 351–377

Abstract

China has expanded its economic footprint in Southeast Asian countries by providing a growing amount of development finance to the region. We examine the allocation of Chinese foreign aid toward Southeast Asian countries exploiting the exogenous variation of rotating leadership within Association of Southeast Asian Nation (ASEAN). As the ASEAN Chair possesses the agenda-setting power and represents the organization, China strategically allocates more development aid to the ASEAN Chair to augment its influence in the region. Our analysis of Chinese aid allocation between 2000 and 2017 finds that taking the leadership position at ASEAN appears to be significantly associated with an increase of official development aid flows from China, while other commercial flows are only weakly associated with the leadership position. Our findings underscore the importance of considering the regional context in examining foreign aid allocation and show that a donor can target a regional organization to exert its political influence in the region.

Publisher Page

Do Voters Reward Politicians for Trade Liberalization? Evidence from South Korea (with Sujin Cha)
Review of International Organizations, 2022, 17: 751–780

Abstract

Do voters reward politicians for trade liberalization? We examine this question by analyzing voter responses in South Korea to the US-Korea Trade Agreement. Exploiting a change in party positions on the FTA over time, we examine the effects of different party positions on outcomes in the legislative and presidential elections. We find that voters who expect direct gains (losses) specifically from the treaty increase (decrease) support for the pro-trade party. However, voters in export-oriented industries do not reward politicians for a free trade agreement that does not directly affect their well-being. Our analysis of seven waves of individual-level panel survey data also demonstrates that a short-term change in a candidate's position on the FTA influences voter decisions in the upcoming presidential election. The findings suggest that voter preferences with regard to trade can materialize into voting behavior when voters have a clear ex ante expectation of specific gains or losses from the trade policy.

Publisher Page