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  • The Politics of Coalition in Korea: Between Institutions and Culture by Youngmi Kim
  • J. J. Suh
The Politics of Coalition in Korea: Between Institutions and Culture by Youngmi Kim. London and New York: Routledge, 2011. 208 pp. $138 (cloth). $51.95 (paper)

The presidential election of 2012 amply demonstrated that coalition building was a prevalent feature of South Korean domestic politics. Opposition parties formed a loose coalition to field a candidate who posed a formidable challenge to the dominant conservative candidate. In the general election earlier in the same year, the main campaign tactic employed by the same opposition parties was to coordinate among themselves to yield in each district a single candidate whom all of them would support. Such coalition building was not limited to the opposition parties. The origin of the ruling Saenuri Party could be traced back to a merger of three parties in 1987, while the opposition parties, too, had their share of mergers. Coalition building and pulling resources and political capital together to win an election or get a legislation passed, is not unique or limited to Korea—it is a staple food of politics in Japan, for example—but South Korea stands out in the extent to which coalition building pervades domestic politics.

Another salient feature of South Korean politics is that the governments after the 1987 democratic transition have had difficulties in implementing some of the policies they favored. The Kim Dae Jung (Kim Taejung) government failed, for example, to adopt a parliamentary system that President Kim Dae Jung had promised to Kim Jong Pil (Kim Chongp’il) in order to form a coalition. Its initiative to reform the election law was reduced to extensive gerrymandering and therefore took forever to pass because no one supported it. The ruling party’s effort to abolish the National Security Law was reduced to a debate on the law’s amendment and that ultimately resulted in no action at all. The succeeding Roh Moo-hyun (No Muhyŏn) administration also had difficulties. It failed to abolish or amend the National Security Law and managed to pass the Private School Law only after the original bill was rendered toothless. Even the conservative Lee Myung-bak (Yi Myŏngbak) administration had its share of governance difficulties. It had to dilute the Grand Canal Project to the Four River Reconstruction Project while failing to reverse the plan to create the administrative capital in Sejong City.

These phenomena make one wonder. Why are coalition building and the subsequent breakups such pervasive and perennial features of domestic politics? Why is it that every administration after the democratic transition has had difficulties in implementing their favored policies? In this book, Youngmi Kim brings these two important questions to bear upon the record of the Kim Dae Jung government as well as, to a lesser extent, the two subsequent administrations. The brilliance of the book is in the underlying—but clumsily fashioned—argument that the two questions are not separate but related to each other by a common problem: the underinstitutionalization of political parties and the party system. The administrations have had governability difficulties because their coalitions were unreliable and unstable. [End Page 228]

While the underinstitutionalization thesis is not a groundbreaking one, Youngmi Kim does a meticulous job of documenting many of the phenomena related to it. After detailing the difficulties that President Kim Dae Jung had in running the country, she convincingly shows that one source of the difficulties laid in the minority status of his party. The National Congress for New Politics (NCNP) had seventy-seven seats out of the total of 293 seats in the National Assembly (p. 46). Kim Dae Jung could not attain a majority in the parliament even after he formed a coalition with Kim Jong Pil, a conservative rival. In order to ensure that his reform policies were not stymied in the legislature, Kim Dae Jung engineered a political reorganization by attracting defectors from the conservative Grand National Party (GNP). Even with the engineered majority, however, the Kim Dae Jung administration failed to get the legislature to amend the constitution or pass many of its reform programs. Youngmi Kim explains Kim Dae Jung...

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