ADRN

party formation, social networks, democratic transition, authoritarian successor party, South Korea

In this paper, we study how political parties react to democratic transitions. We find that the structure of legislators’ social networks plays a critical role in shaping their political interactions during the transition period, and consequently, the post-transition party systems that emerge. We focus on the Korean case, where the incumbent authoritarian party merged with one of its pro-democracy opponents to create a powerful and enduring conservative party under democratic rule. Using a novel individual-level dataset on all legislative members during the transition, we find that the merger was facilitated by dense social networks linking members of the merged parties, which increased trust across the parties and reduced the difficulty of a merger. Conversely, we find that the paucity of ties linking pro-democracy parties hindered their long-term cooperation, despite their shared ideologies and policy goals. The study complements existing theories by providing a network-based explanation for the weakly institutionalized political party system that has characterized Korean politics since democratization. DOI : https://doi.org/10.1017/jea.2019.37

Joon Nak Choi is Adjunct Assistant Professor (formerly Assistant Professor) at the Department of Management and Faculty Associate at the Institute for Emerging Market Studies at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He has also held positions at the Korea Program at Stanford University’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and NYU Shanghai. His research and teaching interests include economic development, social networks, organizational theory, corporate strategy, and global and transnational sociology. Ji Yeon Hong (corresponding author: jyhong@ust.hk) is assistant professor at the Division of Social Science and Faculty Associate at the Institute for Emerging Market Studies at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Her research focuses on the political economy of authoritarian regimes, particularly in the context of East Asia. Her work has been published in the Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, and Economic History Review, among others.