Nomination patronage and party splitting : comparing intraparty politics in South Korea and Taiwan

The political party is a central feature of representative democracy. In the post-War and Third Wave democracies of East Asia, durable political parties have contributed to national development and democratic consolidation. In this context, the transience of South Korean political parties is an anomaly. While no new, major parties have been created in Japan or Taiwan since the 1990s, more than ten major parties have been created or reorganized in South Korea during this thirty year period. Explaining this variation in party stability is critical for advancing democracy in South Korea and understanding democracy in East Asia. Party systems theories explain party behavior in terms of macro political factors such as political systems, voting rules, historical development, and electoral structure. However, the comparison of South Korea to Taiwan confounds these explanations. Party stability varies dramatically between the two countries in spite of their similar political histories, institutions, and electoral structure. This comparison implies that intraparty politics are at play. Prior explanations of South Korea's transient political parties have implicated factional politics, clientelistic voter linkages, or some combination of the two. This explanation is intuitive given the prominence of factional politics and clientelistic voter linkages in Japan and Taiwan. However, empirical evidence and comparative inference cast serious doubt on these claims for South Korea. Contrary to prevailing beliefs, factional politics are not prevalent in South Korean parties and do explain party transience. Building on prior research of intraparty factions, neopatrimonial patronage and contentious networks, the dynamics of faction and patronage politics may be distinguished as follows: 1) Having strong collective identities and weakly differentiated leader-member ties, factions are more capable of collective action, compromise, and coalition building. 2) Having weak collective identities and strongly differentiated patron-client ties, patronage networks are less capable of coalition building and more prone to all-or-nothing co-optation or splitting. This dissertation asserts that party splitting in South Korea is caused by nomination patronage among senior and junior elected officials. This form of intraparty patronage differs from outbound patronage such as clientelistic voter linkages and inbound patronage such as crony capitalism and other extra-legal forms of corruption. The implementation of regional elections in the late 1990s created a new, decentralized stratum of nomination patrons and clients who were more resistant to co-optation by central party leaders and more prone to party splitting. This argument is developed over three empirical studies. The first identifies nomination patronage in South Korea and confirms its absence in Taiwan. The second tests the effects of nomination patronage on party splitting. The third examines motives and moderating factors of nomination patronage, which may be helpful for designing institutional reforms. Although this dissertation dives deeply into the organizational mechanics of nomination patronage, it is important to keep in mind that intraparty nomination patronage directly affects party splitting, and that this has profound implications on party politics and the quality of South Korean democracy. It is hoped that this dissertation not only sheds light the varieties of party politics in East Asian democracies, but also clarifies the mechanisms of party splitting, and offers practical solutions for designing institutional reforms and improving the future of democracy in South Korea

Keywords: Sociology.
Advisor: Shin Gi-Wook
Jackson Matthew O. 
Powell Walter W.
Walder Andrew G. (Andrew George)