Party Organization and Candidate Selection in Transitional Democracies: The South Korean Case

This study aims to trace the recent institutional changes in legislative candidate selection (CS) procedures in South Korea. Candidate selection (CS) is an intra-party decision-making process through which a few among many are nominated as electoral candidates. CS procedures exert significant influence on the composition and performance of executive and legislative organs. One can expect that more inclusive CS methods will improve the quality of the national level democracy by increasing the degree of representativeness. Interestingly, CS methods vary not only from country to country, but also from party to party, as each party has its own culture and characteristics. Also sometimes, CS becomes the object of political reform, since political parties and actors sensitively respond to the change of electoral environment. The current CS of each party is, therefore, the outcome of formation and adaptation of the organization in specific political contexts throughout history. Compared to the counterparts in advanced democratic countries, CS procedures in transitional democratic countries are still less analyzed. Analyzing CS in the new democracies of East Asia, East Europe, and Latin America will help us better understand how democratic institutions are implanted and develop in different regional conditions. From the studies on new democracies, it is possible to explain the impact of democratization on institutional transformation. To answer the question how CS is shaped and changed in transitional countries, this paper empirically investigates the change of CS in South Korea (Korea) where the democratization took place in the late 1980s. Theoretically, historical institutionalism is adopted, and document analysis of recent party statutes and elite interviews are conducted. In the last decade, Korean major parties made strong efforts to make their CS procedures more inclusive by introducing primaries. A few European researchers have pointed out that this is a result of the competition among intra-party factions: the programmatic faction, which prefers primary as a CS method, won against the clientelistic faction, which wants to preserve its exclusive decision-making power. In reality, however, the selection system has not changed dramatically. This can be recognized by the existence of many constituencies where candidates are still selected by the former exclusive method. The main reason for this is that from the very early stage of Korean democratic history, major parties have had a penchant for extremely high levels of centralization. The democratization of Korea failed in producing sufficient pressure towards decentralization of the organizations. From the Korean case study, we can learn the lesson that the current CS of transitional countries has been shaped by the party natures, which have been reinforced throughout history, as well as the particular type of democratization.