Korean Democracy in Transition: A Rational Blueprint for Developing Societies

3 Building a New Party System: The 1990 Party Merger

3 Building a New Party System The 1990 Party Merger The thirteenth national assembly election in Korea, held in 1988 and governed by the new electoral law enacted earlier that year, produced a fourparty system.1 These four parties were the governing DJP and the RDP, the PPD, and the New Democratic Republican Party (NDRP). In January 1990 the DJP, NDRP, and RDP merged to form the Democratic Liberal Party (DLP) and effectively created a two-party system. The PPD was excluded from this new coalition. The merger of the DJP, NDRP, and RDP is puzzling for at least two reasons. First, these parties had very different historical roots, and thus indulging in the idea of merging them seemed to be preposterous at best. Second, both experts and laymen mentioned other merger scenarios that seemed to make more sense than the actual outcome. For example, a DJPNDRP coalition (without the RDP) would have secured a simple majority of seats in the national assembly. Kim Jong-pil and many members of the NDRP belonged to power elites under Park Chung-hee’s authoritarian regime and had military backgrounds. Although Kim Jong-pil was ostracized along with the two other Kims by Chun Doo-hwan, the NDRP and the governing DJP (with a similar military background) still shared a homogeneous conservative political orientation. From 1987, some younger members of the national assembly had called for a merger between the RDP and PPD, the traditional liberal opposition parties, to form a strong unified opposition (Kim and Kim 1990). The RDP-PPD coalition would not have had a majority in the national assembly. However , with 129 seats it would have become as large as the governing DJP. 26 KOREAN DEMOCRACY IN TRANSITION By not including the NDRP it would also have been untainted by an authoritarian past. Toward the end of 1989 several newspaper reports predicted an imminent DJP-PPD coalition. This coalition was perceived by the journalists to be the result of the DJP’s attempt to wash off its old image as an authoritarian governing party and of the PPD’s attempt to portray itself as a moderate, rather than overly progressive, party (Kwon 1990). This coalition of the two larger parties would have produced a commanding majority in the national assembly. Despite the puzzling make-up of the three-party coalition, the surprise merger in Korea has received scant attention in academia. According to Cotton, the merger was simply “the repetition of a political pattern” of prominent opposition leaders’ taking turns in serving the interest of the governing party in Korea (Cotton 1992). Park maintains that the reason for the merger was “the commonality of interest between the three merged parties” (Park Jin 1990). Park’s explanation is essentially correct, but he fails to specify the political actors’ preferences in detail and thus cannot show why this particular coalition, out of the many possible coalitions , was formed. The Assumption of Rationality and Coalition Theory I assume that politicians are rational agents trying to maximize their selfinterest . With the factors determining their interests (and thus their preferences ) properly identified, we can explain why political actors choose certain courses of action. I further assume that, in the Korean context of coalition bargaining in 1990, party members’ preferences coincided with their leaders’ preferences. To the extent that this assumption is true, we can explain party behavior by looking at the interests of party leaders. The plausibility of this assumption is assessed in the final section of this chapter. In this chapter, coalition theory is used to explain the party merger in Korea. Coalition theory is a branch of rational choice theory intended to explain the coalition behavior of different sets of rational actors. In political science it has been used to explain the formation of coalition governments in multiparty systems in Europe and elsewhere. Coalition theory dictates that two factors determine the coalition outcome: the relative power of the actors involved and their preferences over the important issues at hand. In the formation of coalition governments, the power Building a New Party System 27 of political parties is measured by the number of parliamentary seats they control, since the coalition needs to control a certain number of seats (the simple majority of parliamentary seats in most cases) to form a government . The important issue is usually social cleavage. In many countries, such as Sweden, a single cleavage divides parties along left-right...