Sanghoon Kim-Leffingwell

Sanghoon Kim-Leffingwell

Senior Lecturer and Program Coordinator

Johns Hopkins University

I am a Senior Lecturer (full-time faculty) with the Center for Advanced Governmental Studies at Johns Hopkins University. I received my PhD in Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2022. My research interests focus on authoritarian nostalgia and related political behavior in post-authoritarian democracies. My regional focus is on South Korea and other Asian democracies. My book project investigates why individual voters feel nostalgic for an authoritarian past and vote for political parties that are linked to the past. My research has appeared in Party Politics and is forthcoming at the Journal of East Asian Studies.

My current book project, The Past that Binds, provides theoretical and empirical foundations for nostalgic behavior and democratic development, systemically reporting and analyzing the impacts of the sentimental longing for an authoritarian past. I argue that authoritarian nostalgia is an important source of group sentiment in post-authoritarian democracies, which produces large and surprising effects on voter attitudes and behaviors. Voters who share favorable views of the past may construct heightened social identity connected to the past, exhibit strong group sentiment based on historical perception, and express attachment towards authoritarian successors. As a form of social identity, such stronger political attachment can exert greater impacts on political behavior more than ideological or programmatic appeals do.

My research has received support from various sources, including a Taiwan Fellowship from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Taiwan, a Doctoral Fellowship from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, and multiple institutions at the University of Illinois, including Ferber & Sudman Dissertation Awards for Survey Research, a Nelle M. Signor Graduate Scholarship in International Relations, and a CEAPS Graduate Student Dissertation Travel Grant from the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies.

Interests

  • Authoritarian legacies
  • Korean Politics
  • Comparative political behavior
  • Personality and political attitudes
  • Post-authoritarian democracies

Education

  • PhD in Political Science, 2022

    University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  • MA in Political Science, 2016

    Korea University

  • BA in Political Science; Economics, 2011

    Korea University

Research

Book Project

The Past that Binds: Authoritarian Nostalgia, Group Sentiment, and Voter Behavior

More than three decades has passed since the Third Wave of democratization at the end of the twentieth century. While the statues and statutes of former dictators have long been destroyed, nostalgia for the former dictatorship still drives individual political attitudes and related behavior in many democracies. Among sixty-five Third Wave democracies, former authoritarian ruling parties are still active in democratic elections across forty-seven countries, with twenty-eight of them winning more than 20% of vote share.

Research

Authoritarian legacies

Research

Political Economy in Asia

Teaching

Johns Hopkins University, Advanced Academic Programs

Instructor

  • AS470.854 Fundamentals of Quantitative Methods (Spring 2023)
  • AS470.669 Mathematics for Data Scientists (Fall 2022, Spring 2023)
  • AS470.681 Probability and Statistics (Summer, Fall 2022)
  • AS470.768 Programming and Data Management (Summer 2022)

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Instructor

  • PS230 Introduction to Political Research (Spring 2021, Spring 2022)
  • PS241 Comparative Politics in Developing Nations (Online, Spring 2020)
  • GLBL296 Global Politics of Intellectual Property Protection (Spring 2019)
  • PS100 Introduction to Political Science (Online, Spring 2019)

Teaching Assistant

I received the A. Belden Fields Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching as a Teaching Assisant in 2019. Teaching evaluations are available upon request.

  • PS231 Strategic Models (Fall 2020, Fall 2021)
  • PS241 Comparative Politics in Developing Nations (Spring 2018, Fall 2018)
  • PS220 Introduction to Public Policy (Fall 2017)
  • PS322 Law and Public Policy (Spring 2017)
  • PS321 Principles of Public Policy (Fall 2016)

ICPSR, University of Michigan

Teaching Assistant

  • Causal Inference for the Social Sciences (Summer 2021)