"Housing Price Inequality and Candidate Campaign Strategies"

When the opposing-party candidates converge to or diverge from each other? What makes the variation in the candidates' strategies and the contents of their campaign documents? This article sheds light on how inequality in housing price distribution at the district-level influences candidates' campaign strategies. Paying attention to increasing wealth inequality, I claim that high levels of inequality at the district-level make inequality more salient to voters and thus, politicians will focus on the decisive voter at the median price of the housing price distribution. Using an original data set of housing prices at the district-level and campaign brochures from the 2016 Korean General Election using Structural Topic Modeling, I find that candidates running in the same district behave similarly in terms of issue attention when their district's inequality is high.