The paper here re-examines the welfare system change in Korea and Taiwan before 1987 with hitherto under-recognized approaches. This is the period when the two countries were emerging economies and, at the same time, controlled by one dominant party. Given the incomparability of two countries with established welfare states, students of East Asian welfare states have focused on nation-specific factors such as unique cultural or developmental characteristics of the two countries, e.g. Confucian welfare state by Jones (1990) or developmental welfare state by Kwon (2005), to explain welfares system change before 1987. However, the paper here aims to go beyond the previous inductive approaches by focusing on factors that are widely applicable to emerging welfare states around the world.
First, following the latest development on the complex relationships between social policies and authoritarian leaders (Mares and Carnes, 2009), what needs to be considered is the potential role of social policies for authoritarian leaders who prioritize power continuity. It has been often pointed out that, before the democratization, social policies were mainly used as a means to consolidate authoritarian leaders’ political power by strategically controlling important groups, e.g. civil servants, the military, or teachers. However, both countries occasionally saw introduction/expansion of universalistic social policies geared towards median voters or the marginalized, e.g. women, elderly, the disabled, in the form of social assistance. How can we explain this? Are these related to the various forms of social unrests? Or, as demonstrated by latest works showing self-binding role of institutions on dictators, e.g. Gandhi (2008), had changes in political institutions during this period, e.g. electoral rules or constitutional structure, had any effect on social policies?
Second, what have long been under-recognized in understanding welfare systems of emerging welfare economies are international factors such as influence of colonialism or economic and political dependency in the international environment. Latest empirical results show how former colonial powers—Britain, France, and Spain—can influence the pathway and configuration of social security systems (Schimitt, 2015). However, no research to date have systematically examined the influence of Japanese colonial legacies on the initial developments of Korean and Taiwanese welfare system—both of which were based on Germany-style social insurance programs unlike the provident funds based system of Hong Kong and Singapore. Moreover, similar to the comparative case study by Obinger and Schimitt (2011), there needs to be more empirical works conducted regarding the influence of cold-war rivalries—between South Korea and North Korea and between Taiwan and China—on generosity and design of key welfare benefits.
Both in Korea and Taiwan, recent years have seen an explosion of newly accessible information on the web going back to 1950, such as floor speeches or debates in the legislative arena, digitized newspaper articles on political issues, and bill sponsorship records.
Based on an original dataset that consists of submitted bills, newspaper articles, and breakdown of annual expenditure, the analysis here examines ebbs and flows of four types of social policy expansion (pensions, conditional transfers, health services, education) this section focuses on.
