This study approaches the spatial stratification phenomenon through a data-based social stratification approach. In addition, by applying a dissimilarity-based clustering algorithm, this study analyzes how regions cluster as well as their disparities, thereby analyzing socio-spatial inequalities. Ultimately, through map visualization, this study seeks to visually identify spatial forms of social inequality and gain insight into the social structure for policy implications. The results determine how the regions are socioeconomically structured and identify the social inequalities between the spaces.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of social class and lifestyle on the consumption of organic foods in South Korea. Consumer behavior regarding organic foods is influenced by lifestyle, as well as income-level and education. This study provides a new perspective on the socio-economic structure of organic food consumption patterns in urban areas by extracting information from big data. The organic food consumption patterns are then analyzed through visualization of the geographical distribution of organic food stores. In addition, this study estimates the effects of social class and lifestyle variables on the consumption of organic foods based on survey data. This study finds that social class characteristics are factors that influence the consumption of organic foods. However, individual lifestyle plays a more important role in actual buying behavior.

The present study investigates urban poverty in Seoul, South Korea, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on housing and economic challenges. Employing principal component analysis, clustering algorithms, and visualization techniques, it analyzes archived data to uncover disparities in housing conditions and economic well-being across Seoul. The research reveals significant socio-economic divisions, with over 75% of the city’s areas marked by vulnerability, indicating widespread poverty or the concentration of economically disadvantaged populations. This highlights the pervasive nature of poverty and the precarious situation of the urban poor, who are at risk due to fragile living conditions. The findings advocate for inclusive urban development strategies that prioritize the needs of marginalized groups, suggesting a shift from focusing solely on economic growth to ensuring equitable welfare for all residents.

Do home ownership and house prices impact the shaping of individual perceptions on inequality and belief in meritocracy? We argue that home ownership and rising asset prices increase the salience of an individual’s own relative economic position, which in turn facilitates belief in meritocracy. We expect that, when house prices increase, homeowners are likely to strengthen their belief in meritocracy and defend their position by rationalizing that income distribution in society is fair and that economic success and failure are primarily determined by individual efforts. Our analysis of both a Korean panel survey and a cross-national survey finds strong and robust evidence of the asset price effect. Our findings suggest that the housing price effect on economic ideology is a general pattern, which implies that there are social and political consequences to the asset price effect.

This study analyzes political polarization among the South Korean elite by examining 17 years’ worth of subcommittee meeting minutes from the South Korean National Assembly's standing committees. Its analysis applies various natural language processing techniques and the bidirectional encoder representations from the transformers model to measure and analyze polarization in the language used during these meetings. Its findings indicate that the degree of political polarization increased and decreased at various times over the study period but has risen sharply since the second half of 2016 and remained high throughout 2020. This result suggests that partisan political gaps between members of the South Korean National Assembly increase substantially.

The effect of inequality on income bias in voting is a contentious topic in the literature. In this article, we explore the effect of inequality in terms of social context. We argue that perceptions of inequality and regional economic inequality provide a social context in which citizens form relative class identity and shape their political behavior. We analyze individual-level surveys and administrative district-level data consisting of 252 South Korean administrative units in 2012–2020. The findings of the individual-level analysis suggest that perceptions of high inequality boost voter turnout, and that this effect is stronger among citizens with low incomes. As lower-income earners recognize themselves as being at a greater distance from the higher-income group, it activates a grievance effect and increases their incentive to participate in voting. The results from the district-level analysis suggest that the participation of lower-income individuals is more likely to increase in response to local inequality than the participation levels of their higher-income neighbors. Our findings suggest that the mass public utilizes their perceptions of inequality and the degree of intra-regional economic inequality as a heuristic to decide whether to turnout to vote, and that this occurs among both the rich and the poor.