Party System Closure in Asia: On the Causes of Institutionalization since 1945

• In Event: Challenges in Developing Party Systems

Abstract

Party system institutionalization has been traditionally viewed as an essential condition for the consolidation of democracy (Mainwaring, 1999; Hicken and Kuchonta, 2014; Casal Bértoa, 2017). However, there is a far less agreement in the literature about what institutionalizes party systems in the first place.
Seeking to fill this gap, the current paper, building on a mixed-method approach, aims to provide an answer to the question of how such institutionalization occurs and why the degrees of institutionalization vary across countries. Specifically, we conduct a comparative analysis of the process of party system closure in 21 Asian democracies, relatively overlooked regional cases in this literature, since the end of WWII until 2021. Asia provides excellent cases for such analysis, because its democracies show diverse degrees of institutionalization in electoral and governmental dimensions of party systems (Lee and Casal Bértoa, 2021). In the end, this variety will lead us to observe wide inter-state variation in party system institutionalization.
Using a recent innovative index of measuring party system institutionalization by Casal Bertoa and Enyedi (2021), the paper will first present differences in the levels of party system institutionalization in Asia in a comparative perspective. Then, after a thorough review of the literature on different sources of systemic institutionalization (Mainwaring and Bizarro, 2018; Chiaramonte and Emanuele, 2019; Enyedi and Casal Bértoa, 2020), it will state 8 different “working” hypotheses (i.e. party institutionalization, fragmentation, polarization, democratic experience, economic development, constitutional type of regime, electoral system design, historical legacies). In our empirical analysis, we test these hypotheses using both statistical analysis and an in-depth case study (i.e. South Korea). Thus, in our qualitative analysis section, we use process-tracing to unravel the “causal mechanism” linking each of the variables found significant in the quantitative section and the outcome (i.e. high party system closure).

Authors

• Fernando Casal Bertoa, University of Nottingham

• Don S. Lee, Sungkyunkwan University