Comparing Motivations and Ideologies of Local Party Activists in Taiwan, Mongolia, and South Korea

Following the rise of concerns about party-in-decline in the last quarter of the twentieth century, an extensive attention has been devoted to parties’ organizing party members, activists, and campaigns. Much of the existing research focuses on the effectiveness or the changing nature of party organizations and strategies in campaigning at the party level. Even the micro-level analysis on party members is geographically limited to experiences of Western established democracies. Attempting to broaden the scope of the study of party-as-organization, this paper explores the motivational and ideological patterns among local party activists in three third-wave democracies in East Asia. I utilize a unique cross-national and cross-party survey dataset collected two weeks prior to a national election day (South Korea in 2012, Mongolia in 2012 and 2016, and Taiwan in 2016), through face-to-face interviews with local party activists in multiple districts in the three countries. This research will reveal differences in motivational and ideological patterns across parties at the activist level and provide a basis for explaining the variations.