Election System Change in aDemocratizing Country: The Case of South Korea.

Political scientists have studied the design and political impacts of different election systems for some time now, but it is only recently that they have turned their attention to the question of why governments choose to alter the rules under which their respective politicians stand for office. One important consequence of this increased scholarly attention is the finding that this phenomenon occurs more frequently than originally thought. Indeed, the growing literature on this important topic has shown that election system change occurs not only in the world’s established democracies but also in countries that recently made the transition to democracy. Moreover, a small number of studies have shown that manipulations of electoral rules have even occurred in countries that have not completely made the transition to democracy. Between 1948 and 2000 inclusive, sixteen elections were held for the South Korean National Assembly, and, in ten of these national contests, politicians stood for office under election rules that had been altered. While most of these changes were minor and involved shifts in the number of district and PR seats, three were substantial. The first involved the replacement of the SMD system with a mixed system while the second change involved retaining the PR portion of the mixed system but replacing the SMD portion with a system of multimember districts. The final change also retained the PR portion of the mixed system but abandoned the multimember districts by returning to a SMD format. Two of the substantial changes and half of the minor changes discussed above occurred before South Korea made the full transition to democracy. Indeed, the non-democratic governments that enacted these changes, while not extensively popular, were hardly in danger of being eliminated through the electoral process. This raises the interesting question of why these governments found it necessary to support such institutional changes. We show in this paper that such governments, like their counterparts in democratic nations, are concerned less with the imperatives of short-term seat maximization than with how the eventual inclusion of increasingly popular opposition groups will affect their ability to remain in power and influence policy outcomes. The examination of the Korean case allows us to accomplish this because of that fact that election system changes occurred both under conditions of democracy as well as under conditions before the democratic transition have been completed. We evaluate this hypothesis by showing that the governments of South Korea acted in accordance with long-term imperatives under both political conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]