Beyond political citizenship: marriage migrant women’s voting practices in South Korea

ABSTRACT

This study examined the voting practices of Filipina marriage migrants in South Korea. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 66 women, we examine marriage migrant women’s voting through the lens of cultural and performative citizenship. We focus on the gendered and ethnicized integration of marriage migrants into Korean families and in the larger society and how their marginalised social position shapes the women’s voting practices. We identified three voting patterns – dependent, independent, and transitioned – that vary in their degrees of cultural and performative citizenship. We also unpack the characteristics or factors associated with each voting pattern that facilitated marriage migrants’ ability to engage in performative citizenship; that is, to contest their marginalised status and exercise greater autonomy in their candidate choices. Our findings illustrate how viewing immigrant voting through the perspectives of cultural and performative citizenship provides nuanced insights about the meaning and practice of voting beyond its intrinsic function of political representation.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigrant voting
• citizenship
• marriage migration
• family
• South Korea

Introduction

Nicole migrated to South Korea (henceforth Korea) from the Philippines as an industrial trainee in 1997 and a few years later married a Korean colleague at the factory where she worked. She was 49 years old at the time of the study, and, since acquiring Korean citizenship in 2000, she had never questioned her husband’s voting decisions.

It’s my option and decision to follow my husband’s principles in selecting a candidate. Yes, I am a Korean citizen now, but I was not born as a Korean. But my husband will always be an authentic citizen of Korea. He knows better than me about his fellow Koreans [emphasis added].

Voting decisions were one of many spheres where Nicole deferred to her husband and parents-in-law. She had lived with her parents-in-law since her marriage, and she quit her job at the factory to take care of her father-in-law, who suffered from paralysis, until his death. After getting married, Nicole stopped sending money to her family in the Philippines because she thought that was what most Korean women did. Nicole cited following the contemporary Korean family practice of having one or two children as the reason she had only one child, whereas her siblings in the Philippines had six to eight children. Her first words of advice to younger marriage migrants in her neighbourhood were to ‘follow your mother-in-law and then your family; you serve your husband.’ Despite adherence to Korean cultural practices, Nicole still did not consider herself an ‘authentic’ Korean citizen who could make voting decisions on her own, although she had followed ‘all [of] the Korean traditions’ for almost 20 years since settling in Korea. Nicole’s story illustrates one of multiple possible pathways whereby female marriage migrants’ views and performances of citizenship in Korea intersects with gender and family dynamics.

In the past two decades, marriage migration has become a major source of immigration in East Asia (Jones and Shen 2008; Kim and Oh 2011; Jones 2012). As foreign spouses, marriage migrants undergo an expedited naturalisation process in countries such as Korea and Taiwan (Hsia 2009; Kim 2013). In Korea, access to naturalisation has meant that many marriage migrants can participate in the political life of their host countries within a relatively short period of time, including voting in local and federal elections. Indeed, 62% of naturalised marriage migrants report voting (MOGEF 2013).

Despite significant developments in the literature regarding increased marriage migration in East Asia, there is limited knowledge about marriage migrant women’s political participation and the social processes that influence their political activities in receiving countries. In the current study, we address this knowledge gap by examining the voting views and practices of Filipina marriage migrants in Korea. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 66 Filipina marriage migrants, we explore women’s voting through the lens of cultural and performative citizenship. By tracing how women practice voting in their everyday lives and how they experience changes over time, this study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of immigrant voting by showing how marriage migrant women’s political citizenship is intertwined with, and constrained by, host country cultural and gender norms.

Marriage migration and women’s voting in Korea

Since the early 1990s, the Korean government has promoted female marriage migration to resolve the ‘bride famine’ dilemma in rural Korea (Lee 2008). Local governments and agricultural associations arranged meetings between bachelor farmers and ethnic Korean women from China, seeking a solution to declines in the reproduction rate and caregiving functions of rural families. Since the early 2000s, as the commercial marriage industry evolved to encompass free enterprises that do not require government-issued licenses, cross-border marriages proliferated and expanded beyond rural areas. At the same time, the sending countries of female marriage migrants expanded beyond China. Currently, more than 231,000 marriage migrant women live in Korea. Women from China make up the largest share (39%) of the marriage migrant population, followed by women from Vietnam (33%), the Philippines (9%), and Japan (5%). With 48% of marriage migrant women having acquired citizenship and 14% securing permanent resident status, more than half of female marriage migrants in Korea are eligible to vote in national and/or local elections (MOGEF 2019).¹

During the past decade, with the increasing visibility of marriage migrant women and the burgeoning discourse of multiculturalism (Kim 2012), these women’s political participation, especially electoral participation, has garnered wide public attention. For instance, in election periods, marriage migrant women have often been featured as an emerging group of new voters in the news media since the late 2000s (Ryu 2006). Regional branches of Korea’s National Election Commission, an independent constitutional body that manages elections, holds educational programmes and mock elections for marriage migrants during election campaigns. Marriage migrants have also been the target of political parties’ active strategies to garner their votes. For example, major political parties created committees that focus on issues specific to marriage migrants and their families. They also nominated marriage migrants as candidates for various local political offices. The election of a naturalised Filipina marriage migrant to the national Congress in 2012 brought further attention to the potential of female marriage migrants as political subjects representing damunhwa —a Korean translation of ‘multicultural,’ which colloquially refers to families with marriage migrants.

Only a handful of studies have examined marriage migrant women’s voting experience. Using survey data, these studies have identified the importance of Korean language ability, length of stay, the use of the Internet, and community engagement (Ariun 2011; Im and Nam 2014; Lee and Lee 2013) for marriage migrants’ political participation, including voting. In particular, Im and Nam (2014) showed that those who were divorced or separated and employed were more likely to vote, join a political party, or participate in civic organisations. The authors did not further explore why divorce/separation or employment facilitated marriage migrants’ political activities, however. Also not explored in these prior studies is how the marriage migrants voted and why.

Studies on native-born Korean women’s electoral participation have shown that the voting practices of female constituents have undergone significant changes over time. Because politics has been traditionally considered a male domain, up until the 1990s voting rates were lower among female constituents than among their male counterparts. It was also not uncommon for female voters to follow their male family members’ choice of candidates when casting votes (Kim, Kim, and Kim 2001). During the new millennium, however, voting rates among women in their late 20s and 30s who actively participate in the labour market rose sharply compared with their male counterparts. At the same time, a declining trend of women’s reliance on male family members’ voting preferences was observed (Kim, Kim, and Kim 2001; Koo, Yoon, and Choi 2015; Lee 2013). This is not to say that native-born Korean women’s emerging political autonomy is without its challenges. A recent, widely reported incident where a husband in his 80s tore up his wife’s ballot because she did not vote for the same candidate as he did (Kim 2017), shows that native-born Korean women may still be constrained by gendered expectations when it comes to their voting practices.

Situating the voting participation of marriage migrant women

Previous studies on immigrant voting, which focused mainly on the experiences of immigrants in Western democracies, has largely focused on voting as a political citizenship practice. As both the right and duty of a citizen in democracies, scholars have identified voting as the key indicator of immigrants’ adaptation to the host country’s political system (Bloemraad 2006; Bueker 2005; Jones-Correa 2001; Voicu and Comşa 2014). They primarily explain voting as the result of immigrants’ political socialisation about the norms and behaviours of politics in the host country (Bloemraad 2006; Jones-Correa 2001; Ramakrishnan and Espenshade 2001; Voicu and Comşa 2014; White et al. 2008). For example, Bloemraad (2006) explicates the social process of immigrant voting in the US and Canada, where immigrants learn about the host country’s political system and get mobilised to vote, primarily, at least initially, by co-ethnic community leaders and organisations. These studies of political socialisation outline the general mechanism of voting for economic immigrants and refugees.

The voting practices of female marriage migrants may be quite different from other immigrants (e.g. economic, education, and family class immigrants), however. First, marriage migrants have a fast-tracked path to naturalisation. As such, the socialisation process may be truncated. Second, marriage migrants are embedded within native-born Korean families, as opposed to co-ethnic communities. The Korean family, as an institution, has its own norms, much of it rooted in Confucian ideology, that structure the relations among its members, including marriage migrants (Kim 2013). Moreover, female marriage migrants are often located away from co-ethnic community settings that are generally assumed for other immigrants. Consequently, the political socialisation process may be less influenced by co-ethnic community members.

Studies have shown that marriage migrant women in East Asia gain access to both legal and substantive citizenship primarily through their roles as biological and cultural reproducers (Kim 2013; Kim and Vang 2020; Lee 2012; Wang and Bélanger 2008). In other words, their worth as a citizen is often contingent upon their ability to reproduce the next generation of Korean children. This path to ‘ethnicized maternal’ citizenship entails processes of cultural assimilation and ethnic othering (Kim 2013, 456). As newly married daughters-in-law, marriage migrant women are placed at the bottom of the family hierarchy under Confucian patriarchy (Cho 1998; Kandiyoti 1988). Nationalistic discourse regarding the superiority of Korea over marriage migrant women’s countries of origin further relegate the women to inferior ‘others’ (Freeman 2005; Lee 2012; Wang and Bélanger 2008; Bélanger, Lee, and Wang 2010). Marriage migrants from Southeast Asian countries, including Filipinas, are often racialized as ‘dark-skinned foreigners’ from underdeveloped countries and stereotyped as ‘lazy or unrefined’ in familial or communal settings in Korea (Kim 2018, 143).

Theoretical frameworks

Ethnicized maternal citizenship has implications for the kind of political socialisation that occurs for female marriage migrants in Korea. Specifically, the process of acquiring knowledge of the receiving country’s political system, the act of voting, and the decision of who to vote for are filtered through the power dynamics and relations of the Korean family that is different from those of co-ethnic members or ethnic organisations. As such, different theoretical frameworks are needed to situate and interpret the voting behaviours of female marriage migrants. In this section, we briefly outline such an alternative framework.

Building on Foucault’s concept of subjectification, Ong (1996) conceptualises cultural citizenship as the ‘dual process of self-making and being made within webs of power’ (738, emphasis added). Within this framework, the focus is on the interactions where immigrants are subject to various disciplinary regimes by state agencies and civil society, which attempt to instil proper normative behaviour and identity for migrants; thereby setting the criteria of their belonging in the host society (Ong 1999; 2003). For marriage migrant women, the family is a key institution wherein the cultural practices and beliefs that delineate the criteria of their belonging in their immediate Korean family and larger host society are communicated, negotiated, and practiced (Kim 2007; Kim and Vang 2020). From a cultural citizenship standpoint, voting is not a neutral act but one that is potentially fraught with differential power relations along gender and ethnic lines.

Although the cultural citizenship framework acknowledges the process of ‘self-making’ in which immigrants pursue their own goals and needs within the cultural repertoires of the host country by appropriating and deflecting them (Ong 1999; 2003), it often falls short of explaining the transformative and creative endeavour that migrants engage to challenge their marginalised status. In his original formulation, Foucault acknowledges that the process of subjectification involves multiple subject-positions and discourses, which makes it open to resistance and struggles (Foucault 1980; 1982). That is, the existence of local knowledge or situated knowledge, in the language of feminist standpoint theory (Haraway 1988), enables counter-hegemonic practices of those who are marginalised. In terms of voting behaviour, this transformative possibility is better captured by the concept of performative citizenship.

Performative citizenship entails the political and social struggles of citizens and non-citizens who enact citizenship, regardless of their ascribed non-citizen or second class citizen status, by claiming and performing rights and duties as citizens (Isin 2017, 501). According to Isin (2017, 501), ‘how people perform citizenship plays an important role in contesting and constructing citizenship and attaching meanings to rights [emphasis added]’. As such, performative citizenship can be defined as the endeavours of marginalised subjects to assert themselves as equal citizens based on their own situated knowledge. These efforts vary in their transformative ability to contest marginalisation.

The concept of performative citizenship has mainly been discussed in studies of grassroots struggles by non-citizens who act like citizens regardless of their formal status (McNevin 2009; McThomas 2016; Meyer and Fine 2017). Nonetheless, the concept may be useful in understanding the voting acts of new citizens whose belonging is still ‘in the mode of becoming’ (Butler 2004, 217). Specifically, performative citizenship among Filipina marriage migrants would include the actions that women undertake to contest their gendered and ethnicized status within the family. By either openly or surreptitiously voting for their preferred candidates, as opposed to voting for the candidates chosen by their husbands and/or in-laws, marriage migrants are not merely performing a privilege or duty of Korean citizenship, they are also challenging their marginal status in Korean society more generally.

Methods

This study draws on in-depth interviews with 66 Filipina marriage migrants residing in both urban and rural areas of Korea who were eligible to vote, either as citizens (n = 64) or as permanent residents (n = 2). The interviews with Filipina marriage migrants were mostly conducted over a period of seven months in 2014. Between April and June of 2018, follow-up interviews were conducted with 20 of the marriage migrants with whom we initially interviewed in 2014. Because only about a third of the initial interviewees were available for the follow-up interviews, three new Filipina marriage migrants were recruited into the study to partially make-up for the attrition. We chose to recruit Filipinas because of the presence of the Philippine-born congresswoman at the time of fieldwork. We expected that the wide media attention on her congressional seat, as mentioned earlier, might raise political awareness among the Filipinas and influence their voting behaviours. All interviews were conducted in the Seoul Capital Area and in cities and rural areas in the southern part of Korea. Local elections took place in June of 2014 and 2018, which heightened the study participants’ awareness about elections and provided a natural springboard for exploring the women’s views and voting practices during the interviews.

The participants were recruited through Filipina voluntary organisations and subsequent snowball sampling. From these initial contacts, snowball sampling was used to select additional interviewees. The additional interviews were selected to incorporate as much variation as possible in terms of their time since arrival, marital status, and family living arrangements (e.g. nuclear family only or co-habitation with in-laws).

All interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim, in either English or Korean. The interview transcripts were coded using the qualitative software programme NVivo (Bazeley and Jackson 2013). Using the coding process suggested by Strauss and Corbin (1998) as a guide, the first stage involved paragraph-by-paragraph open coding of the transcripts. Recurrent phenomena were then identified and open codes were categorised into higher-order codes, focusing on women’s voting experience. The three voting patterns – dependent, independent, and transitioned – emerged in the process. This process was followed by axial coding, in which higher-order codes were linked to ultimately create a storyline about how these women experienced voting and the factors that shaped each voting pattern.

Table 1 shows the sociodemographic characteristics and voting behaviour of the participants. The average age was 39.7 (range: 25–63) years. Marriage migrants had been in Korea for 12.6 (range: 5–23) years on average at the time of the interviews. Approximately one in four participants had experienced divorce and/or separation. Among those remaining in their marriages, approximately one in four were living with their parents-in-law. In terms of educational attainment, the majority (65%) of the women had earned at least an associate degree in the Philippines. Only three women had no children with their Korean husbands while the rest had two children on average. Almost half of the women were working as part-time English teachers or interpreters, while others were engaged in farming or small businesses (see Table 2).

Table 1. Characteristics of Filipina marriage migrants.

No. of respondents	Average age (range)	Average time since arrival in years (range)	No. of Citizens/No. of PR holders	% Living with in-laws	% Divorced	% Voted in the last election^1	% Associate degree or higher	Average No. of children
66	39.7 (25–63)	12.6 (5–23)	64/2	23% (15/66)	18% (12/66)	95% (63/66)	65%	2

¹ For women who were interviewed in 2014, the last elections were presidential election in 2012 or 2014 local election. For women who were interviewed in 2018, the last election was local election in the same year.

Table 2. Distribution of Filipina marriage migrants’ occupations.

Occupation	Frequency
(English) Teaching	26
Farming	9
Interpreter/Counselor	6
Small/Networking business	7
Caregiving/Nursing	5
Cleaning/Cooking/Serving	4
Factory work	2
Homemaker	7
Total	66

Results

In the 2009 National Survey of Multicultural Families, 56.7% of female marriage migrants who were naturalised citizens reported having voted in Korea. Filipina respondents had the highest rate of voting (66.7%) among marriage migrant women (KIHSA 2010). In comparison, the overwhelming majority (95%) of the Filipina marriage migrants in our study reported voting in a local or national election. Table 3 shows the voting patterns of the 63 marriage migrants who voted in a recent local or national election. These voting patterns, which we labelled as dependent, independent and transitioned represent varying degrees of cultural and performative citizenship.

Table 3. Voting patterns of Filipina marriage migrants who voted in elections between the 2012∼2018 elections.

	VOTING PATTERN Frequency (%)
No. of migrants who voted	Dependent voter	Independent voter	Transitioned voter
63	26 (41.3%)	25 (39.7%)	12 (19%)

Although a ballot is cast individually in the end, voting—and immigrant voting in particular—is also a social process that is influenced by those around the voter (Bloemraad 2006; Gidengil and Stolle 2009; Rolfe 2012). Consequently, for marriage migrant women who come directly to stay with native-Korean families, the family becomes their closest resource and network, influencing their political views and voting behaviour. We found that this influence of the marital family comes with gendered and ethnicized norms and expectations of conformity. To make sense of the degree of ‘webs of power’ within the family (i.e. cultural citizenship) affecting marriage migrants’ voting practices and the extent to which migrant women are able to contest these influential forces (i.e. performative citizenship), we mapped the three voting patterns onto intersecting cultural and performative citizenship dimensions that vary in terms of strength (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Cultural and Performative Citizenship by Voting Pattern.

Approximately forty-one percent of the women followed the voting choices of their husbands and/or parents-in-law (dependent voters). Dependent voters are depicted in quadrant IV in Figure 1 because their voting choices are constrained by the preferences of their husbands and in-laws (strong cultural citizenship) and the act of voting is not perceived by the women as a process of claims-making nor does it serve to challenge the women’s marginalised status within the family (weak performative citizenship). In contrast, independent voters (39.7%) were marriage migrants who voted for their own candidates from the get-go rather than those selected by their husbands and/or in-laws (quadrants I and II). Dynamics of cultural citizenship varied across the weak/strong spectrum for these women depending on the degree of gendered and ethnicized expectations that husbands and/or in-laws had and their attempts to influence or control the marriage migrants’ candidate choices. Despite the varying degrees of cultural citizenship among independent voters, ultimately their high level of autonomy in choosing the candidates signified a strong degree of performative citizenship. Finally, 12 of the marriage migrants initially conformed with the voting choices of their Korean family members but voted for candidates that were not endorsed by their spouses and/or in-laws in subsequent elections (transitioned voters). These women are depicted as moving from quadrant IV to I because the ‘webs of power’ within the family maintain its influence, especially at the beginning. But as a result of various factors, explained below, these women were nonetheless able to lessen the influences of the family over time and exercise greater autonomy in their selection of candidates. This transition to having greater autonomy in voting can be seen as successful instances of low status contestation within the Korean family (i.e. strong performative citizenship).

In the following sections, we further describe the three different types of voting patterns and unpack the factors that influenced these patterns. Key distinguishing characteristics of the three voting patterns are highlighted in Table 4. Excerpts from selected interviewees which illuminate the key characteristics identified in Table 4 are shown.

Table 4. Key characteristics of dependent, independent, and transitioned voters.

Type of Voter	Key Characteristics
Dependent voter	Intergenerational cohabitation and/or strong presence of in-laws in daily lives Self-perception of being less knowledgeable about Korean politics and political candidates than their Korean family members Mobilisation to vote occurred primarily through Koran family members
Independent voter	(mostly) Nuclear family living arrangement Divorced or widowed Prior political socialisation in the Philippines Marriage migrant has an active interest in politics; thus, mobilisation to vote not occurring exclusively through Korean family members Husband indifferent to politics
Transitioned voter	Engagement in local ethnic- or migrant-based communities and organisations Emerging collective identity and sense of belonging as damunhwa Achieved economic independence within the marital family

Dependent voters: voting as a family affair

For participants who followed the decisions of their husbands and in-laws, dependent voting, at least initially, makes sense because of the perception of their own lack of knowledge about Korea’s political structure, history, and candidates. Studies on voting behaviour have shown that employing cognitive shortcuts, such as following the endorsements of trusted others to make up for political ignorance, is a common practice among voters in general (Lau and Redlawsk 2001, 953). Indeed, the participants whose voting choices are consistent with that of their husbands and/or parents-in-laws seemed to be using such cognitive shortcuts. As mentioned by Imee, a 46-year-old Filipina who had been in a leadership role in a religious voluntary association of Filipina marriage migrants, ‘Most of us really vote. We practice the privilege of voting, and, mostly, who do we vote for? Usually we depend on the husband. “Honey, who do you like?” Like that. Whatever our husbands tell us, we vote for them.’

Imee’s explanation echoed that of most dependent voters, who reported that they participated in voting because they think of it as ‘a privilege and duty of a citizen.’ Most of them also expressed positive perceptions toward politics in Korea, which they often contrasted with political corruption in the Philippines. However, they were concerned about their ability to choose the right candidate. Certainly, a lack of information and the language barrier may make it difficult for these new citizens to choose candidates on their own. Previous studies have shown that recent immigrants often experience the ‘liability of newness,’ which may impede their voting participation (Bloemraad 2006, 78; Ramakrishnan and Espenshade 2001). In the present study, many of the participants had a sense of trust toward their husbands or in-laws in terms of candidate selection. These women’s trust was based on their perception that, relative to their husbands or in-laws, they were less informed and less knowledgeable about Korean politics. While employing endorsements of husbands and in-laws may seem to have neutral heuristic value on the surface, upon further investigation we found that the decision was shaped by women’s familial and societal position.

Most dependent voters made sense of their voting practice in the context of their gendered and ethnicized position within the family. The process of voting sometimes served as an opportunity for husbands and parents-in-law to assert or reinforce their superior social position by influencing or controlling marriage migrants’ political decision-making. Nina, a 33-year-old marriage migrant whose household included her parents-in-law, exemplifies the dependent voters we spoke with. She had experienced two elections since becoming a Korean citizen in 2011. When asked how she decided for whom to vote, Nina replied, ‘I asked my father-in-law and mother-in-law. “Oh, you only have to vote for that person, [candidate] number two,” they said (laughs). I don’t know very well [about the candidates], and the political system is quite different in the Philippines.’ As a young mother in a farming family, Nina’s activities outside the home were limited to attending church and participating in the events of a Filipina–Korean couples’ association in her county once or twice a year. Consequently, Nina, like the majority of the dependent voters, were mobilised to vote mostly by their Korean family members.

Some women’s political ignorance and apathy clearly led to dependence in terms of voting, even after more than a decade of residence in Korea, as seen in 40-year-old Mariel’s declaration: ‘I don’t know [the politicians]. I don’t know their education, their experiences. I don’t want to study who’s who and what’s what.’ Mariel said that for the past 10 years, she had always asked her husband which candidate to vote for so that she could finish the voting process quickly. Nevertheless, a closer examination of these women’s endorsement behaviour revealed that there is more than mere political ignorance or apathy at play. Further exploration of the women’s voting experiences revealed a self-perception of always knowing less and thereby being less of an ‘authentic’ and competent citizen relative to their husbands and in-laws. The alignment of marriage migrants’ voting choices with that of their spouses and in-laws, therefore, can be interpreted as deferential compliance. This acquiescence reflects the women’s gendered positions as wives and daughters-in-laws. It also reflects self-perceptions and ascribed view that, as foreigners, the marriage migrants are less knowledgeable citizens relative to their Korean husbands and in-laws.

Emily, a 56-year-old Filipina marriage migrant who had been the president of one of the largest Filipino organisations for more than a decade explained why so many Filipinas she knew followed the voting decisions of their husbands and in-laws:

It is said that there’s a Korean culture and tradition that women must follow their husbands, and especially if the wives are living with their mothers-in-law or parents-in-law, they should follow whatever they say to avoid a quarrel. So [they] just follow [their voting decisions].

Although Emily herself is not a dependent voter, she shared two points that are important for understanding the context of Filipina marriage women’s voting practices. First, women experience voting as part of the ‘Korean culture and tradition’ of following their husbands and in-laws. Thus, endorsing the voting decisions of their husbands and in-laws is understood as a gendered cultural practice that women are expected to follow to maintain uncontested membership in the Korean family as wives and daughters-in-law. Second, women’s nonconformity may lead to a ‘quarrel,’ which could have negative consequences for their position in the family. In other words, some marriage migrants may not agree with their spouses’ or in-laws’ choice of candidates but they go along with it to avoid domestic conflict.

Emily’s interpretation resonates with how Annie, a 42-year-old mother of three who migrated 14 years ago, experienced voting. Annie became a citizen in 2005 and has voted ever since. Her choice has always coincided with that of her husband:

Interviewer:

How do you decide who to vote for?

Annie:

From my husband. I ask him, ‘Who’s your favorite candidate? Who’s doing well?’

Interviewer:

Then you follow him?

Annie:

Yes (laughs). Sometimes I would tell him ‘Sojin’s daddy², I heard this one [candidate] did something [bad],’ then he goes, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t be bothered. You’re supposed to give credit to what I say.’ (laughs) It’s like that.

While Annie watches TV and reads the newspaper for her own information about the candidates and politics in general, she does not argue with her husband when different opinions arise, but rather follows his decision. For instance, one year after arriving in Korea and initially residing with only her husband in a city, she acquiesced to her husband’s desire to move in with her mother-in-law in the countryside. Annie found it ‘suffocating’ to live with her mother-in-law, with whom she could barely communicate and who held traditional views about women not working outside the home. Nonetheless, Annie did not go against her husband’s and mother-in-law’s wishes; she stayed home during her pregnancies rather than work. Annie has been a good negotiator and persuader in getting her husband to contribute with household chores. But this distribution of housework had to be kept a secret. During the interview, she shared a stern reminder that her husband gave her earlier on in their marriage ‘You’d better not tell other people [that I’m doing the housework]. There’s no Korean men [who do the housework]. Men are heaven, yes, heaven.’ Annie’s dependent voting status can thus be viewed as an extension of the existing power dynamics within her household.

The fact that most of the interviewed women had higher educational credentials than their husbands and that they had no difficulty obtaining information about Korean politics did not seem to diminish their sense of knowing less. Given that the women in this study experienced voting mostly as a family affair, where they were mobilised by their husbands and/or in-laws, the sense of being an inferior citizen should be understood as constructed within the hierarchical gender and ethnic ideology that is prevalent in Korean society (Kim 2018). The adage that ‘Men are heaven in Korea’ frequently came up during the interviews with the study participants, underscoring the message that these women received about their social position within the marital union. This male authority extends to the in-laws, in combination with seniority as a basic principle in organising hierarchical relationships within the Korean Confucian family (Cho 1998). Women’s self-perception of political ignorance was juxtaposed with the gendered and ethnicized hierarchy to shape women’s dependent voting choices.

Independent voters: choosing one’s own candidate

There were two distinctive subgroups of marriage migrants who voted independently from the start: overt and covert voters. All of the independent voters were subjected to varying degrees of conforming pressures from their husbands and/or in-laws, with covert independent voters facing the strongest familial demands to follow the voting choices of Korean family members. However, through a complex interplay of household living arrangements, human capital, and personal resources, both groups of women were able to avoid, resist and/or deflect familial attempts to influence their voting decisions; thus, exhibiting strong performative citizenship.

Women who made overt independent voting decisions from the start tend to live with only their nuclear family or to be divorced or widowed. Some of these women’s prior political socialisation in the Philippines and interest in politics led them to actively learn about Korean politics and choose their own candidates. This indicates that nuclear family living arrangements, in addition to interest in politics, are important drivers of independent voting behaviour. For women who were divorced or widowed, the absence of (ex)spouses and/or in-laws in their daily lives meant that they were relatively free from pressures to conform. Likewise, for independent voters in nuclear families, the influence of husbands was either non-existent or not strong because the marriage migrants could draw upon personal and/or external resources to contest their spouses’ attempts to control their voting decisions. As such, cultural citizenship dynamics were fairly weak for overt independent voters.

Emily, a long-time leader of a Filipina organisation in her city who was introduced earlier, exemplifies the overt independent voters we interviewed. Emily had a close relationship with the mayor, who had been supportive of various activities of her organisation. Although she had a relatively low level of fluency in Korean compared with women who arrived in the mid-1990s, the language barrier did not prevent her from ‘educating’ her husband about how they should go about selecting their candidates: ‘He was like, “Oh, this one is more famous” and voted for the candidate. … I said, “No, we should study their platform in the government first.”’ Emily’s prior experience of working as a district secretary for a congresswoman in her hometown in the Philippines, coupled with her educational background in law, gave her the necessary credentials to question her husband’s candidate choice and resist his attempt to influence her choice of candidates. However, she also added, half-jokingly, ‘I’m very lucky I don’t have a mother-in-law [living with us]. Maybe if I had a mother-in-law, I would always [follow her voting decision], you know (laughs).’ Emily’s case illustrates the importance of having prior experience with and an active interest in politics but also the crucial absence of influential cohabiting in-laws. These factors facilitated the acquisition of political knowledge and self-perceived competence in Korean politics.

Notably, a handful of the marriage migrants (5 out of 25) reported that their overt independent decisions were made only after confirming their husbands’ indifference to electoral participation. For these women, their spouses’ political apathy meant that they were free to choose whichever candidate they wanted without having to worry about managing their husbands’ preferences, too. These cases illustrate the complex interplay between women’s performative citizenship and the gendered and ethnicized expectations placed upon them by Korean society. Specifically, marriage migrants, even those who voted independently, have internalised the expectation that voting in damunhwa households should be a family affair. Nonetheless, the absence of interference from their husbands leads us to consider these women as facing weak cultural citizenship dynamics in the family.

Another subgroup of independent voters reported engaging in covert voting behaviours. As voting decisions were not always shared publicly, pretending to conform sufficed to deflect the familial expectations faced by some of the marriage migrants. Nenita, a 40-year-old woman who served as the president of the Philippine–Korean couples’ association in her rural county, recalled several quarrels with her husband during the local election campaign period in 2014 because he wanted to ‘dictate’ her decision: ‘He shouted, “Vote [for] the person I told you, he’s the best, blah blah blah … That man [you chose] is corrupt; never vote for him, understand?” He would repeat what he said almost every day before the election.’ Nenita did not follow her husband’s choice and instead decided on a candidate whom she had researched; seeking information about political candidates on her own is something that Nenita has done since becoming a Korean citizen in 2004. After 13 years of marriage and despite her leadership role in co-ethnic associational activities, she still faced pressure from her husband to align her voting decisions with his. Nenita made sense of her husband’s interference by describing him as a ‘Joseon period namja [man],’ an idiom referring to Korean men who are conservative and patriarchal. Although she did not actively try to persuade him about her decision, she also did not succumb to the pressure to change, saying, ‘He doesn’t have any idea [for] whom I vote. I am the only one [who] knows it.’

As Nenita’s story illustrates, women’s covert independent decision was an attempt to give the appearance of conformity to hegemonic expectations while simultaneously exercising their ideal understanding of political citizenship. Cognisant of their position in the family hierarchy, these women pretend to go along with the voting decisions of their husbands and in-laws, performing the role of a deferential wife and daughter-in-law. Ella, one of a few (3 out of 25) independent voters who were living in intergenerational households at the time of the interview, had lived with her in-laws since she married and immigrated to Korea in 1999. When it comes to voting, she knew how to appease her mother-in-law, who she described as vocal regarding voting decisions. When her mother-in-law said, ‘Let’s vote for this one,’ she always replied, ‘Okay, let’s go for that one,’ but her real decision was made on the basis of what was in the news and the official brochures delivered during the election period:

When you get into the polling place, [your actual voting decision] cannot be seen. I’m supposed to choose what I want. [But in front of my mother-in-law,] I just say ‘Yeah, let’s vote for the one,’ even though I do not like [that candidate].

Living under the same roof with her parents-in-law and the families of her brothers-in-law, Ella gradually realised that she could only create room to maneuver by ‘showing wisely’ about herself to her husband and in-laws. Recalling the early years of her marriage, when her marital family prevented her from handling household money and engaging in activities outside the home, she said, ‘The most important thing is to make your husband and in-laws have trust in you … Only then can you do what you want with no difficulty.’ For Ella, pretending to conform to her mother-in-law’s voting decisions was part of ‘showing wisely’ to protect herself from the potential unwanted consequences a negative evaluation about her might bring.

Through conforming or pseudo-conforming voting practice, Filipina marriage migrants tended to reaffirm their subordinate positions and to reproduce the hierarchical relations in the family. However, as Ella’s story illustrates, what the women earned in return—being considered a trusted member of a Korean family, which also has implications for acceptance and belonging in the broader Korean society—seemed preferable to openly challenging and upsetting their daily lives.

Transitioned voters: emerging sense of knowing better and new identity

Filipinas’ experiences of voting as a ‘family affair,’ where their supposedly more knowledgeable and authentic husbands and/or in-laws directed them to make the ‘right’ voting decisions, were called into question for some of the women, who realised that these family members were not in a position to ‘teach’ them. Some participants had undergone transitions in how they made sense of their voting decisions as they repositioned themselves vis-à-vis their husbands and in-laws and developed their own, independent political perspectives. These women challenged their subjugated position in the family, invoking their better education, financial autonomy and material contributions to the household to justify and/or reinforce their independence. Bell’s story below is illustrative of the transitioned voters.

Belle, a 45-year-old widower and mother of one child initially voted for the same candidates that her parents-in-law did. But Belle declared that she would ‘absolutely never’ follow them again: ‘I can get better information than my parents-in-law. They are illiterate, and I [have] survived without their help. I didn’t ask for a single penny from them.’ As one of the few Filipina marriage migrants in her rural county earning their living by teaching English, Belle had raised her son without help from her parents-in-law following her husband’s death more than a decade earlier. Her self-definition as an independent provider for her family and as a survivor made her question how she had voted previously.

Through their everyday experiences in the families and local communities as ethnic minorities, women also developed a ‘group-based ethos,’ which often leads to political action (Collins 2010, 15). The emerging sense of belonging to their local co-ethnic communities and communities of damunhwa was closely tied to their firsthand experience in community organising. After the women began to understand Korean politics as something closely related with their everyday community life and challenged their ascribed position as ‘inferior’ members within the family, they no longer based their voting decisions on what their husbands or in-laws wanted. These women’s regular participation in community gatherings also often resulted in direct encounters with political candidates, contributing to the women’s perceptions of ‘knowing better.’

Marjorie’s transition demonstrates this point well. Marjorie, a 35-year-old who migrated to Korea in 2000, had led an association of more than 220 Filipino/a migrant wives and workers since 2007, facilitating members’ gatherings and organising seasonal sports leagues. As an official contact person of the association, Marjorie had established close relationships with a Korean nongovernmental organisation and with the religious leaders in her city. Since becoming a Korean citizen in 2003, Marjorie has voted in every election. Remembering several initial elections where she voted following her husband’s decisions, she said, ‘My husband used to tell me whom to vote [for]. … But now I know better. … You know, the Conservative Party is strong in this Southeast region. I know that, so I go for the Conservative Party. Now I’m also looking into the Democratic Party’ (emphasis added).

Marjorie and other transitioned voters rearranged their acts of voting to construct themselves as members of their emerging new belongings and in doing so, challenging their gendered and ethnicized positions in the family and larger host society. With women contributing significantly to the family economy, acquiring political knowledge and developing direct contacts with politicians through community engagement, they rarely reported being concerned about following the voting decisions of their husbands or in-laws. Forging an independent political perspective and sense of belonging outside the realm of the Korean family was particularly prominent among those who were divorced from their Korean husbands. By engaging in community gatherings through various multicultural family-related events and activities and/or voluntary associational activities, these women developed a new collective identity—not as wives or daughters-in-law in Korean families, but rather as members of multicultural families, which are legally recognised by the Korean government as a group and becoming increasingly visible in political scene as mentioned earlier.

Similar to what scholars have found about immigrant women’s political participation (Hardy-Fanta 1993; Jones-Correa 1998), these women’s community engagement fostered their interests and engagement in Korean politics. However, whereas previous studies on Latin American immigrants found that female immigrants were often marginalised from the leadership positions of ethnic organisations and tended to value grassroots community organising over electoral politics (Hardy-Fanta 1993), transitioned voters in our study who were active in community organising took leadership roles in their associations and were empowered to vote independently. For them, the performative aspect of voting independently, rather than the representational value of casting a vote, seemed to matter more because it signified their economic independence within the marital family and an emerging new identity as damunhwa.

Women’s performative citizenship that resists their marginalised status sometimes went beyond casting ballots. The contradictions between their new-found identity and their marginalised status in their families and in the larger society, prompted some of the marriage migrants became more actively engaged in formal politics. Such was the case for Erin, who ran for office; thereby demonstrating the most active form of formal political participation among the participants. Having lived in Korea for 23 years, Erin ran for a city council seat in the 2014 local election. When asked about her volunteer activism for migrant wives and workers, which she attributes to influencing her decision to run for office, she responded:

I got angry as I got to know more. If I’d rather stay ignorant, I would think, ‘Well, this is the way it is.’ When I knew nothing about Korea, my husband or other people around me would say, ‘You should do this and that in Korea.’ I was like, ‘Oh yes, I should follow.’ However, as we [migrants] learn things more, we get to think about things like human rights and what we can do about it. We deserve so much more than this. I felt like we are just being controlled. … They [Koreans] always see us as unable and weak. I just want to change their minds [by running for the candidacy].

As a former president of a Filipino voluntary association and an active migrant advocate in her community, Erin knew that the odds of winning the candidacy were not great given the small number of eligible voters among migrants in her city. However, through the act of running for office, she wanted to challenge the perception of migrants as being ‘unable and weak’ and assert themselves as the claimants of rights who ‘deserve so much more.’ In this light, as with others who transitioned to independent voting, electoral participation was viewed as an act of defiance—a potential rupturing of gendered and ethnicized expectations—as much as the intrinsic value of political representation.

As women develop a sense of ‘knowing better’ and as they realise the contradictions inherent in their ascribed position as inferior citizens, they endeavour to forge self-defined connections between themselves and their families and communities, as competent providers for their families and knowledgeable community members. The act of voting takes on different meaning as part of this development, evolving from a family affair into an act of contestation, transforming their social position and image as less authentic citizens. As these developments unfolded, women redefined the ways in which they voted—no longer deriving their social or political identities from those of their husbands and in-laws, but, rather, putting forth their own experiences as marriage migrants in multicultural families and communities.

Conclusion

By highlighting how marriage migrant women practice and attach varied and changing meanings to the act of voting, this study sheds light on how specific social location influences immigrant voting. We have shown that the voting practices of most Filipina marriage migrant women, who are in a marginalised social position in Korea, are realised in the context of a gendered and ethic hierarchy within the family. Given that most of these women at least initially experience voting as a family affair, mobilised primarily by their husbands and/or in-laws, voting is experienced in line with their everyday lived realities of hierarchy and dependency. Their self-perceptions of being an inauthentic and less knowledgeable citizen led them to derive their sociopolitical identities, which are manifested in their voting choices, from their husbands and in-laws.

Realising the contradictions between their definitions of themselves and their ascribed subjugated position in the family and society, some women experienced a transition to independent voting. As they begin to value their own situated knowledge (Haraway 1988), which is firmly grounded in their own experiences and perceptions about themselves, these women questioned the hegemonic expectations of the gender and ethnic hierarchy prevalent in Korean society. Through the act of independent voting based on their own understanding of their situation and experience as marriage migrant community members, women constructed themselves as legitimate members of Korean society. The women’s seemingly passive and dependent voting behaviour reflects their incorporation into Korean society primarily as dependents of their Korean husbands and as stigmatised others. The path to political empowerment for these women thus inevitably involves a process of forging and advancing self-defined perspectives.

Our findings illustrate how viewing immigrant voting through the perspectives of cultural and performative citizenship can reveal varied meaning and practice of voting beyond its intrinsic function of political representation. Achieving political equality in participatory democracy often requires more than guaranteeing ‘one person, one vote.’ When the premise of universal citizenship does not recognise disadvantaged groups, as Young (1989, 259) has argued, ‘equality of citizenship makes some people more powerful citizens’ than others, reproducing the existing oppression of certain groups. As the present study has shown, examining voting as an everyday practice of cultural citizenship and tracing its transition to a transformative citizen act can provide a more nuanced understanding of immigrant voting and political participation.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the editors and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions on this article. We express our deepest gratitude to all the participants of this study who generously shared their stories and made this research possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by JSPS: [Grant Number 18K12917].

Notes

1 Since 2005, immigrants to Korea who have held permanent residency for more than three years have been eligible to vote in local elections.

2 It is a casual custom to call a husband by one’s offspring’s name in Korea.