Does female bureaucratic support for female political leaders change over time? Existing research focuses on factors that vary across countries. Little work examines how contingent events within a context impact gender-based solidarity. Drawing on collective identity theory, we argue that high-profile incidents of perceived gender-based injustice against a female president could increase female bureaucrats’ support for the leader. To explore this, we leverage a unique setting of a female president's impeachment in South Korea to assess the relationship between gender and bureaucrats’ support. Examining support for President Park before and after the impeachment, we find that her impeachment has a gendered impact on support, with female bureaucrats’ support increasing and male bureaucratic support remaining unchanged. Furthermore, mediation analysis provides suggestive evidence that the result operates through a heightened sense of injustice. Our findings suggest that support for female political leaders varies not only across countries, but also shifts within governments.

In this paper, we study how a combination of random ballot ordering and concurrent elections can increase invalid votes in the context of South Korea. In South Korea, elections for the nonpartisan superintendent of education are held concurrently with other partisan races. Whereas the ballot order for candidates in the nonpartisan superintendent of education elections is randomized and rotated, this order for other partisan races is determined according to the number of seats each party has in the national legislature. In this study, we found that a match between candidates’ partisan preferences and their ballot positions decreases invalid votes. Our findings suggest that combining two different ballot-order schemes for concurrently held elections can confuse voters and increase invalid votes.