Party system institutionalization without parties: evidence from Korea

Formally institutionalized party organization is usually considered a prerequisite for the development of programmatic linkages between parties and voters. However, this paper shows that political parties in South Korea have succeeded in stabilizing interparty competition through programmatic linkages without making any significant efforts to build a formal organizational base. In fact, it could be argued that Korea is a “partyless” democracy, as political parties get easily captured by the interests of ambitious politicians, thus failing to establish themselves as independent actors. The paper therefore makes a more general argument about the concept of party system institutionalization: We need to rethink the current practice of aggregating the different attributes of party system institutionalization into a single scale, as these attributes do not seem to be connected in a linear fashion.