10

THE DEVELOPMENT OF
PARTY SYSTEMS
Olli Hellmann

Political parties, as agencies of interest aggregation and interest articulation, play an important
role in stabilizing democratic governance and helping democracy take root in society. However,
the effectiveness of parties in fulfilling their democratic functions depends to a large extent on
the interactions between them – or put differently, the democracy-enhancing potential of par-
ties hinges on the party system. In particular, scholars of political parties have identified three
elements of party systems that are important in this regard: (1) How many parties are there?
(2) How do political parties link themselves with the electorate? (3) How stable are patterns of
interparty competition?
As this chapter will show, party systems in the three democracies of East Asia (Japan, South
Korea, Taiwan) perform relatively well on these dimensions. Generally, it is accurate to describe
them as stable two-party systems that have increasingly been mobilizing electoral support
through programmatic rather than clientelistic linkages. If we take a closer look, however, we
find a number of problems. For one, political parties in Japan and South Korea lack formally
institutionalized grassroots organizations that would enable citizens’ participation in party inter-
nal decision-making processes. The Taiwanese party system, on the other hand, continues to be
strongly structured around clientelistic linkages, with political parties targeting certain voter
groups with particularistic benefits rather than public goods.
This chapter will not only discuss the implications for democratic consolidation that stem
from these problems, but it will also discuss factors that can help explain why East Asian party
systems have so far not been able to overcome their deficiencies. In doing so, we will take
advantage of the fact that democratic processes in East Asia have unfolded in very similar socio-
economic and institutional contexts.The conclusion that emerges out of this exercise is twofold:
while differences in party organization are rooted in historical factors, the divergent develop-
ment of linkage mechanisms has primarily been driven by voters’ evaluations of political parties’
ability to sustain economic growth.

Party system size: how many parties are there?

Beginning the analysis with the element of party system size, the first thing to note is that scholars
are in disagreement over whether two-party systems or multiparty systems are better for demo-
cratic governance. Nonetheless, there appears to be a stronger inclination toward the two-party

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type, which describes the situation where there are two major parties – of roughly equal strength
– competing to form single-party majority governments. In particular, scholars make the following
arguments in support of two-party systems: (1) because all main parties have a chance to govern,
they make more inclusive appeals and avoid extreme claims; (2) due to the high frequency of sin-
gle-party governments, responsibility for policy outcomes is clearly identifiable by the electorate;
(3) voters influence directly the formation of government and can thus vote poorly performing
parties out of office; and (4) governments tend to be more stable and less prone to collapse.
Based on these arguments, the performance of party systems in East Asia can be viewed as
positive, since electoral politics has generally tended towards a two-party race. This becomes
immediately evident if we quantify the fragmentation of the party system using Laakso and
Taagepera’s (1979) frequently used measure of the effective number of political parties. Essentially,
the measure captures the number of parties weighed by their size – either parties’ vote share
(effective number of electoral parties [Eff Nv]) or parliamentary seat share (effective number of
parliamentary parties [Eff Ns]) – through the following formula:

Eff N =
1
Eff N =
∑
n
pi2
i =1

where n is the number of parties with at least one vote/seat and pi2 is the square of each party’s
proportion of all votes/seats.
Of the two measures, Eff Ns is the more appropriate for assessing the performance of a
party system. This is because Eff Ns is directly relevant for determining whether govern-
ments will typically consist of a single party or a coalition of multiple parties, which – as just
explained – lies at the root of the argument in favour of two-party systems. As can be seen
from Figure 10.1, for the three East Asian democracies, the Eff Ns score has for the past twenty

Figure 10.1 Effective number of parliamentary parties

Source: Author’s own calculation

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years been hovering around the 2.5 mark. In qualitative terms, this can be described as a two-
party system – although, at times, the two main parties may require the support of smaller
“third” parties to form parliamentary majorities.
If we calculate the Eff Ns score for historically more distant elections, it becomes clear that, for
the case of Taiwan, the two-and-half party system constitutes a significant increase in the number
of relevant parties. However, it needs to be remembered from earlier chapters of this volume
that, up until the late 1980s, Taiwan was best described as a hegemonic “electoral authoritarian”
regime in which opposition parties were banned and the Kuomintang (KMT) routinely won
overwhelming majorities. On the other hand, under the military-bureaucratic regime in South
Korea – which also relinquished power in the late 1980s – elections were more competitive, with
opposition parties regularly winning considerable numbers of parliamentary seats.
The Japanese party system – despite the implementation of a democratic form of govern-
ment after WWII – was, at least until the late 1960s, described as a “one-and-a-half party system”
(Scalapino and Masumi 1962), pitting the dominant Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) against the
half-as-large Japan Socialist Party (JSP). However, the LDP found its electoral support increas-
ingly eroded as rapidly intensifying social problems caused by unchecked industrialization (such
as pollution and social welfare) turned growing numbers of voters – in particular in urban areas –
away from the party. This expanding pool of independent voters not only gave existing opposi-
tion parties, such as the JSP or the Japan Communist Party (JCP), an opportunity to increase
their vote share, but it also opened up space for the emergence of new parties, such as the Komeito
or the New Liberal Club (NLC). Nevertheless, the LDP managed to hold on to government,
continuing to enjoy single-party majorities until 1993. For the most part, the LDP’s persisting
dominance was based on the party fostering support among rural voters through redistributive
“side payments” (Pempel 1998: 60–61) and designing a system of electoral malapportionment
that favoured rural over urban districts. This led, as Scheiner argues, to the emergence of “two
parallel party systems: an LDP-dominated rural party system and a more competitive urban one”
(2006: 48; emphasis in the original).
In the end, the so-called 1955 system – a term coined by scholars of Japanese politics with
reference to the founding year of the LDP – collapsed because of a split within the LDP’s own
ranks. In a context of growing voter discontent over economic mismanagement, a number of
LDP defectors established their own political vehicles before the 1993 election to join opposi-
tion parties in their demands for a replacement of the single non-transferable vote (SNTV) system
(see Chapter 9), which was widely perceived as fuelling corruption and “money politics” (Hell-
mann 2014a). With the LDP’s voter base divided, a seven-party coalition assumed control of
government – albeit not for long, as, shortly after passing electoral reform, the coalition broke
apart and the LDP (in a coalition with the JSP) retook power. Nonetheless, the 1993 elections
mark a watershed moment in the political history of Japan, triggering a period of profound
party system realignment (clearly evidenced by above-average Eff Ns scores in the mid-1990s)
that gave rise to what Hrebenar and Itoh call the “second postwar party system” (2015; emphasis
added). This new party system is dominated by two main parties: the LDP and the Democratic
Party of Japan (DPJ), which was established by LDP and JSP splinter groups in 1998.
In post-authoritarian Taiwan, the two-party system has consolidated around the former
regime party, the KMT, and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which emerged out of
the pro-democratic dangwai movement. The two parties mainly compete on the question of
national identity: while the KMT advocates closer ties with mainland China, the DPP appeals to
Taiwanese-nationalist sentiment (Hsieh 2002). As can be seen from Figure 10.1, this two-party
constellation did not emerge from a linear process, but the party system underwent a period
of electoral fragmentation, which reached its peak around the 2001 parliamentary election.

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 Olli Hellmann

Fragmentation increased as splinter parties broke away from both the KMT (the New Party in
1993 and the People First Party in 2000) and the DPP (the Taiwan Solidarity Union in 2001).
The emergence of these parties was facilitated by the fact that the two main parties had gradu-
ally moved closer towards the centre of the national-identity spectrum, thus alienating signifi-
cant voter groups at the extremes of the spectrum. In more recent elections, however, the Eff
Ns score has again dropped – for mainly two reasons: first, both the KMT and the DPP have
readjusted their position on the issue of Taiwan-China relations (Fell 2014); second, electoral
reform replaced SNTV with a less proportional mixed-member system, which has made it more
difficult for smaller parties to win parliamentary seats (see Chapter 9).
In South Korea, the two-party system is anchored in regional identities – although, as will
be discussed in the next section, programmatic differences are becoming more important in
structuring interparty competition (also see Hellmann 2014b). More specifically, the two main
parties – which change their names with such frequency that it makes little sense to introduce
them here – maintain respective strongholds in the regions of Yeongnam and Honam; closely
contested electoral districts can only be found in Seoul and surrounding areas (Park 2002). To
some extent, the roots of this regional cleavage can be traced back to the authoritarian regime:
while Yeongam was the home region of dictator Park Chung-hee and received the lion’s share
of industrial investment, Honam became a hotbed of political opposition to authoritarian rule.
Within this context of politicized regional identities, third parties have generally played merely
a minor role.The only relevant minor party worth mentioning is the left-wing Unified Progres-
sive Party (UPP), which was established as the Democratic Labour Party (DLP) in 2000 and has,
since the electoral reform in 2004, won an average three per cent of parliamentary seats.

Party-voter linkages: programmatic or clientelistic?

Broadly speaking, interparty competition can be structured around three different types of
politician-voter linkage: clientelism and programmatic appeals.1 Both of these strategies are based
on parties promising to distribute material goods to voters – they differ, however, as to whether
citizens’ entitlements to these goods are codified in a formal document.We speak of programmatic
linkages when politicians develop “packages of policies that they commit to enact if elected to
political office with sufficient support” and these policy packages “award benefits to citizens
regardless of whom they voted for in the election” (Kitschelt et al. 2010: 16). If, on the other
hand, politicians are not guided by transparent principles of distribution and the delivery of
material benefits comes with “electoral strings” attached – that is, if benefits are only distrib-
uted to individuals or small groups who have already delivered or who promise to deliver
their votes – this would be classified as a clientelistic electoral strategy (Hicken 2011). Gener-
ally, programmatically structured party systems are considered to have a more positive impact
on how democracy functions than party systems where clientelistic parties predominate. Most
importantly, clientelism undermines voters’ ability to hold politicians accountable, strengthens
incumbent control over elections, and compromises the secret ballot.
Traditionally, party systems in East Asia have been heavily based on clientelism as a mecha-
nism for electoral mobilization. Under Japan’s “1955 system”, politicians of the dominant Lib-
eral Democratic Party (LDP) relied on a mix of three primary strategies to cultivate clientelistic
linkages with the electorate. First, individual candidates maintained their personal patron-client
machines – the famous koenkai – at the local level, which were designed to elicit voters’ electoral
support in exchange for material benefits, “ranging from providing tax advice to fixing traffic
tickets and job hunting on behalf of constituents, their relatives and friends” (Fukui and Fukai

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 The development of party systems

1999: 127). Second, candidates laid virtual “pipelines of pork” that delivered public funds to
local politicians, who, in return, mobilized voters to support the respective candidate in national
elections (Fukui and Fukai 1996). Third, through participation in the LDP’s Policy Affairs and
Research Council (PARC) – which had the power to veto all emerging policy proposals before
these were introduced to parliament – politicians had the opportunity to “press for policies and
budget allocations that benefit[ed] their constituents” (Ramseyer and Rosenbluth 1997: 32).
Politicians used the complex divisional structure of the PARC to target public funding very
narrowly – for example, to agricultural cooperatives or construction companies.These organiza-
tions, to fulfil their part of the clientelistic deal, would then instruct their members or employees
to vote for the politician on election day (Scheiner 2006: 72–73).
While under Japan’s “1955 system”, individual candidates were thus largely responsible
for nurturing their own clientelistic networks; in authoritarian Taiwan, the KMT opted for a
centralized distribution of particularistic goods. To begin with, in the SNTV system’s multi-
member constituencies, candidates were allocated so-called responsibility zones and were sub-
jected to penalties if they campaigned outside their own zone (Liu 1999). Moreover, to assist
candidates in their campaigns, the KMT maintained a party-controlled vote buying system that
connected the party headquarters to local vote brokers (called tiau-a-ka in Taiwanese), most of
whom were recruited among local politicians, criminal gang leaders, heads of voluntary organi-
zations, or business owners (Chin 2003: 136). Where possible, the KMT relied on local factions
(difang paixi) – large, interpersonal networks held together by informal social ties (such as kin,
friendship, neighbourhood, school) – which provided “ready-made” networks of vote brokers.
In return for their electoral support, local factions were given economic privileges, such as
special loans by provincial banks, contracts for public construction projects, and protection for
illegal businesses (for example, brothels and gambling dens). In particular, farmers’ and fisher-
men’s associations played an important role in distributing clientelistic resources to local factions
(Rigger 1999: 77–80).
Under the autocratic regime in Korea, clientelism was also organized in a more central-
ized fashion than in Japan. Although individual candidates maintained similar political machines
compared to the koenkai – referred to as sajojik in Korean – these machines were not fuelled
with resources by the candidate’s individual effort. Rather, patron-client networks in authori-
tarian Korea depended heavily on the allocation of resources from the regime leadership. One
important source of funding was money that regime leaders had collected through institution-
alized corruption channels. In particular, it was large business conglomerates – the so-called
chaebol – that paid significant bribes to senior politicians in exchange for privileged access to
public resources, such as state loans (Kang 2002). Moreover, in rural areas, the regime relied on
the Ministry for Home Affairs (MHA) – with its “power to affect almost all facets of everyday
life in the countryside” – and the National Agricultural Cooperative Federation (NACF), which
was famers’ only source of credit, marketing, and fertilizer, to mobilize voters in elections (Lee
2011: 348–349). More specifically, the regime instructed local officials to strategically funnel
state resources into clientelistic machines, tying their career progression to “how effectively they
supported the ruling party’s candidates in the current election” (Chon 2000: 75).
However, in recent years, the importance of clientelistic linkages as a mobilizational mecha-
nism has – for reasons that will be discussed later – declined significantly in Japan and Korea.
Evidence for this comes, first of all, from a cross-national expert survey on politician-voter
linkages conducted by Herbert Kitschelt and his team at Duke University. As can be seen from
Figure 10.2, the verdict among experts of Japanese and Korean politics is that parties and poli-
ticians nowadays only make a “moderate” effort at targeting voters with preferential benefits,
which constitutes a notable cut-back compared to the late 1990s (see Figure 10.3). In contrast,

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 Figure 10.2 Linkage mechanisms
Source: Democratic Accountability and Linkages Project
Notes: The left-hand axis refers to the mean score of responses to the following question: “In general, how much
effort do politicians and parties in this country make to induce voters with preferential benefits to cast their votes
for them? (1) A negligible effort or none at all; (2) a minor effort; (3) a moderate effort; (4) a major effort.” The
right-hand axis represents the CoSalPo score, which is calculated by multiplying three indicators of programmatic
structuration: the cohesion of parties’ appeals on an issue position, the salience of the issue position, and the degree
of polarization of parties on issue positions.

Figure 10.3 Clientelistic linkages (change between 1999 and 2009)

Source: Democratic Accountability and Linkages Project
Notes: The chart reports mean scores of responses to two questions in the expert survey. Change in effort: “Do
politicians nowadays make the same, greater or lesser effort to provide preferential benefits to individuals and small
groups of voters than they did about ten years ago? (1) A much lesser effort now; (2) a somewhat lesser effort now; (3)
about the same effort now; (4) a somewhat greater effort now; (5) a much greater effort now”. Change in monitor-
ing capacity: “Please assess how effective political parties are in their efforts to mobilize voters by targeted benefits.
(1) not at all; (2) to a small extent; (3) to a moderate extent; (4) to a great extent”.

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 The development of party systems

in Taiwan, despite the effectiveness of clientelistic monitoring, mechanisms having dropped con-
siderably in the recent past, politicians and parties continue to engage in particularistic efforts
at a high level. Conversely, party systems in Japan and Korea are deemed to be structured much
more closely around programmatic platforms than the party system in Taiwan.
Moreover, evidence for this shift from clientelistically to programmatically structured compe-
tition is also provided by single-country studies. For examples, scholars of Japanese and Korean
electoral politics have provided evidence that the success rate of “newcomer” candidates has
improved considerably in recent elections (Reed et al. 2012), that particularistic spending on
public infrastructure projects has dropped sharply (Noble 2010), that political parties increas-
ingly invest in mass-media campaigns to appeal to voters through policy platforms (Koellner
2009), and that voters, to a growing extent, choose parties based on their personal ideological
orientations (Hellmann 2014b).
Studies of electoral politics in Taiwan, on the other hand, do not suggest a similarly notable tran-
sition toward programmatic interparty competition. Instead, scholars have observed that “vote buy-
ing is still common in rural areas” and “remains an invaluable tool for some politicians” (Fell 2012:
80). Similarly, it seems that local factions – as the main vehicles for the organization of vote buying
and the distribution of clientelistic benefits – “not only survived democratization, but even pros-
pered in the new, more liberal climate” (Göbel 2012: 88).This assessment aligns with Fields’s (2002)
discussion of how, after the introduction of free and fair election, the KMT – in addition to relying
on public organizations (such as farmers’ and fishermen’s associations) – turned to party-owned
enterprises as a source of clientelistic goods. In particular, party-owned enterprises provided three
broad types of resources to reward local factions for their electoral support: (1) construction and
other business contracts, (2) employment, and (3) local monopolies, such as natural gas provision.

Party system institutionalization: how stable are

patterns of interparty competition?
“An institutionalized party system”, to put it in the words of Mainwaring and Torcal (2006: 206),

is one in which actors develop expectations and behaviour based on the premise that
the fundamental contours and rules of party competition and behaviour will prevail
into the foreseeable future. In an institutionalized party system, there is stability in who
the main parties are and how they behave.

Such predictability and stability is generally regarded as being critical for democratic development –
in particular, scholars stress the following benefits of institutionalized party systems: (1) voters’
ability to hold politicians and parties accountable is greatly enhanced; (2) legislative parties tend
to be more cohesive, thus increasing their ability to deliver on electoral promises; and (3) the
entry barriers for populist anti-system politicians are relatively high.
To capture differences in party system institutionalization, scholars usually build on the semi-
nal framework developed by Mainwaring and Scully (1995), which is based on a set of four
attributes: (1) the stability in the nature of interparty competition, (2) political parties’ rooted-
ness in society, (3) the degree of legitimacy attributed to parties and the electoral process, and
(4) the extensiveness and “systemness” of political party organization. If we apply this framework
to East Asia, it becomes clear that party systems are relatively well institutionalized. However, as
the subsequent discussion will show, political parties in Japan and Korea suffer from significant
weaknesses on the dimension of party organization.

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 Olli Hellmann

The standard measure for the stability of interparty competition is that of electoral volatility.
Essentially, electoral volatility expresses the change in aggregate party vote shares from one
election to the next. Whereas low volatility means that there is a great deal of continuity in the
distribution of votes among parties, high volatility can reflect either elite-driven changes in the
party system (such as the emergence of new parties or party mergers) or changes in voters’ party
preferences (Mainwaring and Zoco 2007: 158).
The most widely used method to determine electoral volatility is the Pedersen index (Ped-
ersen 1979), which is calculated by taking the sum of the absolute changes in vote shares from
one election to the other and then dividing this sum by two:

∑
n
pit − pi (t +1)
i =1
Volatility =
2

where n is the number of parties and pi stands for the percentage of votes obtained by that party
at elections t and t+1. The index varies between the extremes of 100 (all votes have shifted to
other parties) and 0 (the same parties received exactly the same share of votes).
Existing studies that have applied the volatility index to the party systems of East Asia tend
to come to the conclusion that, while interparty competition has generally been very stable in
Japan and Taiwan, Korea’s party system scores extraordinarily low on this particular dimension
of party system institutionalization (e.g., Stockton 2001; Hicken and Kuhonta 2011; Croissant
and Völkel 2012;Wong 2015). However, these studies make the mistake of including elite-driven
modifications to the party system (e.g., party mergers, party splits, and parties changing names)
in the calculation of electoral volatility. In doing so, they ignore the fact that behind all the elite-
driven changes in the South Korean party system lies a profound continuity of personalities and
intra-elite networks held together by school and regional ties (Hellmann 2014b: 60). Hence, it
makes much more sense to exclude elite-driven changes to the party system from the calcula-
tion of electoral volatility. If we do this, it becomes obvious that interparty competition has
indeed been incredibly stable in post-autocratic Korea, as indicated by an “adjusted” volatility
score comparable to Japan and Taiwan (see Figure 10.4).
Mainwaring and Scully’s second attribute of party institutionalization is parties’ roots in society.
For a party system to be considered institutionalized,“parties must have somewhat stable roots in
society; otherwise they do not structure political preferences over time and there is limited regu-
larity in how people vote” (Mainwaring and Scully 1995: 5). Probably the most valid measure
of social rootedness is the strength of partisan identity – that is, the extent to which voters feel
attached to particular parties. As can be seen from Figure 10.5, in East Asia, the share of voters
expressing some party attachment ranges between thirty-eight (Korea) and fifty-five per cent
(Japan). These may not seem particularly high scores, but – as a matter of fact – they lie within
the range of established democracies in other parts of the world.
On the third dimension of party system institutionalization, the East Asian party systems per-
form relatively more poorly. As Mainwaring and Scully make clear, “in an institutionalized demo-
cratic party system, the major political actors accord legitimacy to the electoral process and to
parties” (1995: 5; emphasis added). East Asian party systems do not fully meet this requirement as
there are sizable minorities of citizens who say that they have absolutely no trust in political parties
(see Figure 10.6). However, it needs to be pointed out that these rates of distrust – ranging from
twenty-one (Korea) to thirty-one per cent of citizens (Japan) – are by no means an indication of
an inchoate party system. Most representative democracies around the world – with perhaps the
exception of democracies in Western Europe – display similar, if not higher, levels of distrust.

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 The development of party systems

Figure 10.4 Electoral volatility

Source: Author’s own calculation

Figure 10.5 Partisan identity

Source: Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) survey
Notes: Percentage of respondents answering “yes” to the question: “Are you close to any political party?”

On the other hand, on the fourth dimension of party system institutionalization – that of
party organization – party systems in East Asia, in particular the Japanese and Korean systems,
reveal serious weaknesses. According to Mainwaring and Scully, in an institutionalized party
system, parties “are not subordinated to the interests of ambitious leaders; they acquire an inde-
pendent status and value of their own” (1995: 5). This condition, in turn, can only be satisfied
“if parties have firmly established structures; if they are territorially comprehensive; if they are
well organized; if they have clearly defined internal structures and procedures; and if they have

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Figure 10.6 Trust in political parties

Source: World Value Survey
Notes: Percentage of respondents in the top three boxes for the following question: “Could you tell me how much
confidence you have in political parties: is it a great deal of confidence, quite a lot of confidence, not very much
confidence or none at all?”

resources of their own” (Mainwaring 1999: 28). In East Asia, only a small number of parties tick
all of these boxes – most notably, the two main Taiwanese parties (KMT, DPP), the JCP, and the
UPP.2 These parties maintain centrally-managed networks of local branches where citizens can
enrol as members, they are governed by formally institutionalized rules for career advancement
and candidate nomination, and they generate their own income, for example through member-
ship fees or party-owned enterprises.
The main parties in Japan and Korea, in contrast, are not based on formal organizational
structures.To begin with, they lack a formally constituted branch network. Japanese parties have
been described as “ghosts without feet” (Foster 1982), inspired by the finding that local party
organization largely consists of individual politicians’ koenkai. Likewise, in Korea, it still holds
what Park (1988: 1051) observed in the 1980s: “[t]he district party is based [. . .] on personal and
particularistic bonds between a political boss and followers”, with party “members” – if they can
even be referred to as such – primarily recruited from among friends and family. Second, party
internal career paths are not formally institutionalized either. Most importantly, the selection
of candidates for parliamentary elections takes place behind closed doors in a highly secretive
and undemocratic process. Third, despite the fact that both Japan (in 1994) and Korea (in 1999)
introduced a public subsidy system for political parties, parties – as abstract organizations – are
not a major source of funding for individual candidates’ election campaigns. In Japan, politicians
have exploited various regulatory loopholes to funnel public money earmarked for party-related
activities into their own personal koenkai (Carlson 2012) and, in addition, continue to generate
considerable income through institutionalized corruption (Woodall 2015). In Korea, political
funding streams have traditionally mainly been targeted towards presidential candidates, who
would then channel funds to legislators and parliamentary candidates within their own party
(Park 2008). As in Japan, many of these streams have taken corrupt forms; however, unlike in
Japan, corruption has been described not as a quid pro quo system, but as “elite cartel” corruption
where politicians and heads of the chaebol are bound together in informal interpersonal networks

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 The development of party systems

(Johnston 2008). Yet, while it appears as if stricter anti-corruption legislation has been able to
disrupt the black money market (Ko and Cho 2015), political parties have not been able to fill
the funding gap; instead, individual candidates need to rely on their own fund-raising abilities.3

Explaining the deficiencies of East Asian party systems

The discussion so far has revealed that party systems in East Asia do relatively well in performing
the functions attributed to them by the pluralistic theory of democracy. However, the discussion
also highlighted some weaknesses. First, while party systems in Japan and Korea have become
more programmatically structured in recent years, the Taiwanese party system continues to be
heavily based on clientelistic linkages. Second, although otherwise displaying comparatively
high levels of institutionalization, party systems in Japan and Korea are held back by a poor
record on the party-organization dimension. The question that will be discussed in this section
is this: how can these deficiencies be explained?

Party-voter linkages
Before explaining the continuing importance of clientelistic linkages as a mobilizational instru-
ment in the case of Taiwan, it is important to remind ourselves of two things. First, while many
Taiwanese politicians continue to rely on the targeted delivery of particularistic goods as an
electoral strategy, monitoring mechanisms designed to ensure that voters stick to their end of the
clientelistic exchange agreement have significantly decreased in efficiency in recent years (see
Figure 10.3). Second, as qualitative research on elections in Taiwan shows, clientelism is primar-
ily a strategy employed by politicians competing in rural constituencies; in contrast, clientelism
plays only an insignificant role in urban areas (e.g., Fell 2012: 80; Göbel 2012).
These two trends are consistent with theoretical expectations regarding the effectiveness
of clientelism as a mobilizational tool. Generally, it has been argued that economic develop-
ment and urbanization are factors that contribute to the erosion of clientelism: not only does
increased voter mobility – both physical and occupational mobility – make it more difficult for
politicians to tie voters into patron-client networks, but rising living standards lead voters to
reassess the utility of particularistic goods distributed through clientelistic channels.
A similar rural-urban divide in the effectiveness of clientelism was – for many years – also
observable in Japan and Korea. As explained earlier, under Japan’s “1955 system”, the LDP used
its monopoly over central government funds to fuel various types of clientelistic linkages with
the electorate. In rural areas, these clientelistic strategies worked very effectively and allowed the
LDP to establish a dominant-party system, whereas in urban areas interparty competition was
more competitive and more programmatically structured. To a large extent, this was because

the average residents of rural areas displayed socioeconomic or demographic charac-

teristics that made them more likely to support localistic and clientelistic politics than
residents of more urban areas. Rural Japanese were older, less-educated [sic], more
likely to be employed in clientelism-related professions, and work in a smaller work-
place than urban Japanese.
(Scheiner 2006: 87)

Similarly, under the autocratic regime in Korea, elections produced a clear urban-rural split
in voting behaviour, with more affluent urban voters supporting the pro-democracy opposi-
tion and less well-off rural voters throwing their weight behind the regime party. Again, these

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patterns partly reflected the fact that urban middle-class voters did not depend on particular-
istic benefits to maintain their standard of living and were thus able to vote for programmatic
alternatives.
However, although clientelism continued to be an efficient electoral strategy in rural areas,
Japanese and Korean politicians implemented a series of administrative reforms that have made
it very difficult to misuse public resources for clientelistic ends. In Japan, the most important
reforms in this regard were implemented under the government of Junichiro Koizumi (2001–
2006), including, for example, the privatization of the postal savings system, and institutional
measures aimed at streamlining local government and strengthening the prime minister’s control
over governmental spending (Amyx et al. 2005; Noble 2010).4 In Korea, where resources for
the maintenance of patron-client networks were mainly generated by presidential candidates
through their personal connections to business conglomerates, it was the strengthening of the
political finance regime under the Kim Dae-jung (1998–2003) and Roh Tae-woo (2003–2008)
governments that cut clientelistic machines off from the supply of financial resources, thus seal-
ing their demise.
In both Japan and Taiwan, these reforms were driven by economic crises, confirming
Kitschelt’s argument that, in affluent democracies, “clientelism as a political mode of exchange
faces demise when its institutional arrangements become fetters stifling the material possibilities
of economic performance” (2007: 299). In Japan, public opinion – especially after the asset price
bubble burst in the early 1990s – increasingly blamed the LDP’s clientelistic “side payments” for
the emergence of a “dual economy” in which highly competitive export-oriented companies
co-existed with uncompetitive sectors that enjoyed extensive protection and subsidization (Katz
1998; Pempel 1998).The ensuing debate over how to revitalize the economy revealed a deep rift
in the LDP between “pork” and “productivity” factions, with the latter – after much strategic
manoeuvring by Prime Minister Koizumi – eventually coming out on top to implement its
reform programme (Pempel 2010). In Korea, the intensification of electoral competition after
the end of autocratic rule had done nothing to undermine patron-clientelism. Quite the oppo-
site: politicians’ scramble for money to fuel patron-client networks became more intense, thus
fostering corruption and “money politics” (Kang 2002; Park 2008). Hence, when the 1997 Asian
financial crisis hit Korea, the lax political funding regime was widely identified as a cause for the
chaebols’ debt burden and manufacturing overcapacity. This, in turn, facilitated the implementa-
tion of campaign finance reforms under the Kim and Roh administrations.
The Taiwanese economy, in contrast, has been able to avoid serious crises. Most importantly,
Taiwan sailed through the 1997 storm relatively unscathed. As a result, unlike in Japan and Korea,
there has never been, to put it in the words of Kitschelt (2007: 307), “a receptive audience to
challenge established modes of citizen-politician accountability”. After winning the government
from the KMT in 2000, the DPP set out to fight clientelism through administrative reform – for
example, by abolishing local-level elections or depriving farmers’ associations of the power to
make loans. However, the DPP’s reform plans met with strong social resistance, forcing the party
to shelve most of them.
It is important to point out, however, that subsequently a number of broader political reforms
were passed that – at least theoretically – may have undermined the basis for clientelism. For one,
in 2008, the SNTV electoral system was replaced with a mixed-member system, which meant
that the element of co-partisan competition for district votes had been removed. Yet, despite
changed incentive structures, a number of studies have found that local factions and their clien-
telistic networks continue to do well in elections (e.g., Wang and Huang 2010; Göbel 2012).5
Moreover, through the Local Government Act implemented in 2009, a number of counties
and cities were merged into larger so-called special municipalities – a move that abolished a

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whole tier of elected administrative bodies in these counties and cities, which, in turn, may have
weakened the power base of local factions. While we lack systematic studies to assess the effect
of administrative reform on party-voter linkages, anecdotal evidence suggests that the targeting
of particularistic benefits (e.g., through vote buying) remains a common electoral strategy in
special municipality elections (e.g., Braig 2010).

Party organization
While clientelistic linkages thus continue to play a more important electoral role in Taiwan than
in Japan or Korea, the Taiwanese party system displays a higher level of institutionalization than
its Japanese and Korean counterparts – in particular, on the dimension of party system organiza-
tion.6 Yet, before jumping into an analysis of the factors that can explain the weakness of formal
party organization in Japan and Korea, the question that presents itself is this: to what extent
do formally institutionalized parties pose the exception rather than the rule in contemporary
democracies? As Randall and Svåsand conclude in their study of party politics in non-Western
settings, “for perhaps the great majority of parties there are formidable obstacles in the way of
institutionalization” (2002: 25; emphasis added). In other words, is it reasonable to expect politi-
cal parties to develop formally institutionalized rank-and-file organizations that are governed
by clear rules for career advancement and control their own financial resources, or is this is an
idealized party model that is closely based on how the historical development of political parties
unfolded in Western Europe?
The history of political parties in Europe starts with the so-called cadre party, which emerged
in the early to mid-nineteenth century when the suffrage was limited and voting restricted to
a privileged few. Given that winning elections only required the mobilization of a small num-
ber of enfranchised voters, the cadre party did not develop an extra-parliamentary apparatus;
instead, politicians relied on their own personal resources and networks to gather votes. How-
ever, these poorly institutionalized parties came under increasing pressure, as social groups that
were excluded from political power – most notably, the working class – began to organize their
own parties. Because these groups lacked the resources of the ruling elite, they established “mass
parties”, characterized by a large base of members who supported the party through the pay-
ment of regular dues and the provision of voluntary labour during election campaigns. In return
for their contributions, the mass party gave members participatory rights in internal decision-
making processes, such as the election of leaders or the nomination of candidates.With progress-
ing industrialization, which meant that more and more citizens were able to meet the suffrage
requirements of the regime censitaire, mass parties grew in strength, forcing elitist cadre parties to
seek voters beyond their traditional constituencies in the upper economic strata of society. This,
in turn, made it necessary for cadre parties to emulate the mass party as an organizational type
and institutionalize a more extensive grassroots foundation.
In short, in Europe, formally institutionalized parties emerged as social classes excluded from
the parliamentary arena sought to generate the resources necessary to challenge “internally
created” parties. The latter’s function was merely to coordinate legislative voting, which meant
that they did not require an extra-parliamentary organization. Yet they saw themselves forced
to intensify their organizational efforts as “externally created” mass parties – boosted by rising
number of industrial workers – grew in strength. In other words, the electoral success of the
leftist mass party created a “contagion effect” whereby parties of the right also built institutional-
ized party structures.
The development of political parties in Japan followed a similar sequence. The first par-
ties to emerge under the restricted-suffrage regime of the Meiji era in the nineteenth century

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looked very much like the European cadre party – in particular, they lacked formal structures
and instead were held together entirely by personal loyalties. At the same time, repressive anti-
socialist laws effectively undermined any efforts of the growing working class to develop its
own electoral vehicles. This changed after WWII, however, when the external imposition of
democracy gave left-wing parties – most notably, the JSP and the JCP – full freedom to organ-
ize themselves along mass party lines. In turn, these activities “continually stimulated a sense of
disquiet among conservative politicians and businessmen” (Calder 1988: 82), eventually prompt-
ing LDP leaders to institutionalize organizational structures that were “modeled [. . .] after the
British Conservative Party and other European parties that had strong central institutions and
permanent national and local organizations” (Richardson 1997: 50). However, it was the par-
ticular genesis of the LDP that prevented such a contagion effect from occurring: as Krauss and
Pekkanen convincingly argue, the formation of the LDP through a merger of the two main
conservative parties had created strong incentives for politicians to establish their own electoral
machines as “[f]ormer liberals and democrats squabbled about who would hold power in the
local party branches” (2011: 54). Once investments had been sunk, politicians refused to give
up their koenkai and subordinate themselves to central party control. Leaders thus had no other
choice but to leave the koenkai untouched and turn the LDP into a “mass personalized-network
party” (Richardson 2001) rather than a formally institutionalized party.
Unlike in Europe or Japan, industrialization in Korea took place under authoritarian rule, not
under oligarchic democracy with a restricted franchise. Political activity by the working class was
thus even more severely suppressed, which put a serious brake on the emergence of a formally
institutionalized mass party that could have articulated workers’ grievances. Meanwhile, the regime
party relied largely on state agencies and individual candidates’ sajojik to mobilize voters, and thus
also remained poorly institutionalized.With democratization, restrictions on political organization
were lifted; however, parties still did not develop formally institutionalized structures. The reason
being that parties, as briefly discussed earlier, came to be fuelled mainly by money collected by
presidential candidates through their personal networks. The analytical distinction between inter-
nally and externally created parties that can help explain the proliferation of strongly institutional-
ized parties in Europe is therefore difficult to apply to the Korean case – simply because all major
parties were able to generate electorally valuable resources without necessarily holding political
office. The only notable example of an externally created party is the minor UPP, which, due to
its ideological background, has never been a prime target for corporate contributions.
In the case of Taiwan, on the other hand, both major parties were – if we stretch the con-
cept somewhat – externally created. The KMT has its origins in the early twentieth-century
nationalist revolutionary movement that aimed to unify China against the resistance of regional
warlords. With the revolution losing momentum in the early 1920s, the KMT turned to the
Soviet Union for assistance, with the goal of reorganizing itself into a disciplined Leninist-
type mass party. After losing the Chinese Civil War to Mao’s communists and being forced to
retreat to Taiwan, the KMT then underwent another reorganization in the early 1950s. Stick-
ing to Leninist principles of party organization, “the KMT reinvigorated those aspects that had
become dormant because this dormancy was believed to be a primary cause for its defeat on
the mainland” (Dickson 1993: 60). More specifically, this included the establishment of a dense
network of party branches and cells, and the adoption of “democratic centralism” as the primary
decision-making principle. Decades later, when, in the late 1980s, the KMT decided to liberalize
the political system, a contagion effect induced the DPP to adopt similar institutional structures.
As Cheng and Hsu explain, “[a]s soon as the political thaw began in 1986, the democratic oppo-
sition lost no time in formalizing itself and, in doing so, borrowed from the ruling party all of its
organizational components” (2015: 128).

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In short, this admittedly simplified comparison of the historical development of European

and East Asian parties shows that the circumstances of party formation matter to explain the
degree of formal party institutionalization: parties that were established externally – that is, par-
ties that came into being to challenge the political system from the outside – developed formally
institutionalized structures, whereas parties that were internally created did not. However, there
was one significant difference in how organizational trajectories unfolded: while in Europe
externally created parties subsequently had a strong contagion effect on internally created par-
ties, such effects did not occur in East Asia – either because internally created parties have been
carrying significant organizational “baggage” (LDP) or because externally created parties have
simply been too weak (UPP).

Conclusion
This chapter has outlined the development of party systems in East Asia over the last three dec-
ades. The conclusion we can draw is that, generally, party systems are quite effective at perform-
ing their democratic functions. However, party systems also display problematic features. First,
party systems in Japan and Korea are characterized by a striking lack of formally institutional-
ized party organization. Second, Taiwan’s party system – at least in rural areas – continues to be
structured strongly around clientelistic linkages. It was argued in the discussion that these weak-
nesses can be traced back to different factors: while historical factors – in particular, the context
of party formation – best explain the low degree of formal institutionalization of Japanese and
Korean parties, the persistence of clientelism in Taiwan is mainly due to the fact that – unlike
in Japan and Korea – public debate has not blamed clientelism for economic mismanagement
and underperformance.
The consequences of party systems’ structural weaknesses for democratic governance mani-
fest themselves in several ways. For example, the absence of formal rank-and-file membership
organizations in Japan has contributed to a growing number of “hereditary parliamentarians”
(seshu-giin), whereby politicians “inherit” the jiban (constituency base) as well as the koenkai from
their fathers, grandfathers, or other kin (Hrebenar and Itoh 2015: 14–16). Similarly, in Korea, the
weakness of political parties as abstract organizations makes it very easy for ambitious politicians
to capture parties for their own personal interests. A clear indication of such “predatory” behav-
iour can be seen before parliamentary elections, when party leaders purge the organization of
legislators loyal to their predecessor and tilt the selection of candidates in favour of their own
supporters (Hellmann 2014b: 67–68). In Taiwan, on the other hand, the prevalence of clientelis-
tic linkages in rural areas means that the policy interests of certain social groups (for example,
farmers) are not properly aggregated and articulated.
Although specific predictions about the future development of East Asian party systems are
difficult to make, it is at least possible to comment on possible broader trends. First, with respect
to party systems in Japan and Korea, while internal decision-making processes and finance
practices may become more formalized in the future, we are unlikely see the implementation
of formal rank-and-file structures. This is because party membership organizations are largely a
thing of the past; technological developments in mass media and the advent of public funding
mean that party members have become less important as organizational assets, which is partly
reflected in declining party membership figures across contemporary democracies around the
world. Second, regarding Taiwan’s party system, it must again be emphasized that the effective-
ness of clientelism as an electoral strategy has already declined significantly in recent years. This
trend is likely to continue and may even accelerate – in particular, if economic downturn shifts
the public focus onto the inefficiencies inherent in clientelism or if programmatic political

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parties succeed in convincing rural voters that they will be better off voting for policies rather
than particularistic goods. In fact, it seems that a move towards greater programmaticness is
already underway, with a number of recent studies diagnosing an increasingly polarized party
system around issues of social welfare and social justice (e.g., Qi 2013; Zheng 2013).

Notes
1 Affective ties – based on shared physical or cultural traits between the voter and politician (such as lan-
guage, region, or ethnicity) – are a third type of linkage.They play a role in structuring the Korean party
system, as indicated by clear – albeit weakening – regional voting patterns.
2 There is no space here for a comprehensive overview of party organization in East Asia. For more
detailed analyses, see Hellmann (2011; 2013), Krauss and Pekkanen (2011), and Rigger (2001).
3 This information has been derived from a series of interviews conducted by the author with Korean
legislators in August 2012.
4 The postal savings system was the world’s largest financial institution, with about US$2.4 trillion depos-
ited in the early 2000s, and an important off-budget source for the financing of public infrastructure
projects. Moreover, the dense network of post offices provided the LDP with a formidable machine for
electoral mobilization, with many local postmasters performing key functions related to campaigning and
the organization of koenkai.
5 One explanation that can be offered is that the new mixed-member electoral system continues to pro-
vide incentives for candidate-centred campaigning and thus for politicians to maintain clientelistic links
to local factions. A similar argument has been made for Japan, which dropped SNTV in 1993 but has not
seen a decline in the importance of koenkai as campaign machines (e.g., Krauss and Pekkanen 2004). In
other words, electoral reform seems to have contributed very little to the decline of clientelistic practices
in Japan and is unlikely to significantly re-configure politician-voter linkages in Taiwan.
6 The discussion in the following paragraphs is largely based on Hellmann (2013).

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