Gyeonggi Province Governor Dong Yeon Kim ranked first in Korea in a poll conducted by a Korean polling organization on the local government leader approval expansion index.

The Leader Approval Expansion Index is a metric that shows the growth of current support relative to the number of votes won at the time of election, with a value above 100 indicating that support has increased since the beginning of the term, and a value below 100 indicating that support has decreased.

Governor Dong Yeon Kim ranked first in the country with an expansion index of 120.2 points, a 29.5-point difference from the second-ranked Incheon Mayor (90.7 points), according to the August 2023 Metropolitan Local Government Assessment released on September 14 by the pollster Realmeter. Governor Kim is the only local government leader to exceed his vote share, and has been in first place since last August, when the survey began.

In August 2023, Governor Kim ranked third in the positive rating of local government leaders with 59%, an increase of 3.5 percentage points from the previous month (55.5%). Of particular note, while the number of “very good” responses was lower than the number of “good” responses for most leaders, Governor Kim’s 33.7% “very well done” rating is higher than the 25.3% “good” rating.

In August, Gyeonggi Province ranked first among the nation’s 17 metropolitan areas in terms of resident life satisfaction, with a score of 67.4%. Seoul ranked second with 66.7% and Jeju third with 65.5%.

The survey was conducted by Realmeter from July 27 to 30 and August 26 to 31 among a nationally representative sample of 13,600 men and women, aged 18 and older, using automated random-digit dialing. The margin of sampling error for each metropolitan area is ±3.5 percentage points at the 95% confidence level, with a response rate of 2.2%.