Identification with television newscasters and Korean college students’ voting intentions and political activities Sungjin Ryu, 1 Susan Kline 2 and Jinsuk Kim 3 1 School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Daegu University, Daegu, South Korea; 2 School of Communica- tion, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio and 3 Jinsuk Kim, School of Communication, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, USA In 2004, many prominent newscasters ran as candidates in the Korean general election and won. The present study examines whether young voters’ identification with newscasters was significantly associated with Korean voting behaviour as well as with other forms of political participation. Analysis of 270 respondents showed that identification with newscasters contributed significantly to young Koreans’ intentions to vote for newscasters and to their active involvement in other forms of campaign participation, beyond the effects of age, gender, and level of political interest.Additionally, news media exposure, perception of newscaster behaviours, emotional involve- ment, surveillance motivation and entertainment motivation were all positively related to voters’ identification with newscasters. Key words: identification, newscasters, news entertainment, political activities, voting intentions. Introduction Identification has been viewed as a psychological process at work in the media that can have important effects (Turner & Berkowitz, 1972; Cohen, 2001). While most researchers have examined the effects of identification with media char- acters on an audience’s social behaviour, the aim of the present study is to examine the role of identification in the context of political activity. In Korea, it is not unusual for major political parties to recruit well-known newscasters and journalists to become candidates for their representative parties (Kim, D, 2004; Kim, S, 2004). Of the 273 candidates who participated in the Korean general election in 2000, 65 had previously worked as journalists and newscasters. More than half of these candidates (45) also successfully won their elections, which corresponds to 16% of those candidates elected to the National Assembly (Lee, C, 2003). This political phe- nomenon continued in the 2004 Korean general election, in which 12 of 17 newscasters or news reporters who ran for office entered the National Assembly (Lee, 2004). Among the current representatives, 42 out of 299 (or 14%) were journalists or newscasters, with 18 (or 6%) journalists who had worked for national broadcasting stations. By contrast, analyses of legislative member websites shows that only 6% of the US House of Representatives, 6% of the Austra- lian House of Representatives, and 10% of India’s Lok Sabha had members with any sort of journalism experience prior to entering the national legislature, much less broad- cast journalism experience. 1 The phenomenon of newscaster candidates has attracted the attention of election analysts. While some are con- cerned about a loss of the journalism watchdog function due to journalists’ direct involvement in politics (Lee, S, 2003), we instead examine whether young Koreans’ iden- tification with newscasters is associated with their voting intentions and campaign activities. The personal behav- iours of famous Korean newscasters have become hot news stories and online fan clubs for newscasters have formed. However, little empirical research has revealed what com- municative and motivational factors are associated with a willingness to identify with newscasters and whether iden- tification with newscaster candidates could be associated with Korean political participation. Identification Scholars such as Freud, Mead, Erickson, Burke and Kelman have all considered identification to be a key construct in social influence. While there are diverse conceptions of identification, common to many is that identification is an immersion process in which audiences lose their self-awareness and become more closely con- nected to another person’s or media character’s perspective (Cohen, 2001). Applied here, identification involves inter- nalizing a media character’s perspective through under- standing and empathizing with the media character. Attempts have begun to distinguish identification from related constructs, such as liking, similarity, imitation, and Correspondence: Sungjin Ryu, School of Journalism & Mass Communication, Daegu University, Daegu, South Korea. Email: ryufaith72@gmail.com Received 22 November 2005; accepted 15 March 2007. © 2007 The Authors © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd with the Asian Association of Social Psychology and the Japanese Group Dynamics Association Asian Journal of Social Psychology (2007), 10, 188–197 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-839X.2007.00225.x