Democracy without Parties? Political Parties and Social Movements for Democratic Representation in Korea

This paper reinterprets Korean democracy from its distinctive pattern of how democratic representation takes place. Vibrant and vocal social movement actors have been at the forefront of democratic politics, whereas unstable and inchoate political parties have been incapable of representing and aggregating citizens’ demand for reform and change. These parties have posed serious predicaments for the deepening of Korean democracy by limiting the ideological diversity of political choices, making party politics unstable and unaccountable, and breeding parochial interests instead of universalism in public policy formation. These under-institutionalized political parties, this paper suggests, originate from the legacies of authoritarian intervention into electoral politics. Authoritarians stifled the political expression of socioeconomic cleavages and created the disjuncture between parties’ reliance on divisive regionalism and the institutional rules that favor two parties. Faced with this dilemma, political parties were thrown into a constant reshuffling of their organizational entities to maximize their electoral fortune. With authoritarians’ frequent interruption in the electoral arena, it was further impossible for politicians to invest in party organizations and procedures to solve the problem of social choice. These processes eventually deprived individual politicians of the incentives and capacities to aggregate citizen preferences and form stable party organizations.