When unowned issues become salient: the strategic choice of offensive party communication in South Korean presidential elections

Abstract This study investigates how parties adjust their offensive communication when facing the strategic dilemma of unowned issues becoming salient. Using party press releases from the two major South Korean parties across the 18th–20th presidential elections, it measures offensiveness with a KcELECTRA model fine-tuned on the Korean Offensive Language Dataset and constructs two outcomes, Aggregate Offensiveness and Offensive Intensity , by issue and day. The analysis reveals that parties generally escalate offensive communication as issue salience rises. Crucially, a significant interaction effect indicates that parties sharply intensify offensiveness specifically when unowned issues become salient. However, this strategic response varied during the 19th election following the presidential impeachment. The findings suggest that offensive communication is a strategic response to unfavourable issue competition environments, and the study demonstrates how deep-learning-based text analysis can quantify offensiveness in party communication.