Rational Actors and Institutional Choices in Korea

The relationships between electoral systems, parties, and election outcomes have received renewed attention in recent years. Many countries in Eastern Europe and elsewhere are searching for new forms of electoral institutions at the time of democratic transition from previously authoritarian rule. It is generally assumed in studies of institutions and democratic transitions that political actors have many goals and objectives that go into their calculus of institutional choice at the time they bargain for a new form of institutions. The important but previously under-studied questions are (i) whether an electoral institution can accommodate these goals simultaneously; and (ii) how would political actors react in the absence of such an electoral institution? In this paper, I try to answer these questions using the Korean example where the democratically elected government of Kim Dae-jung has been pushing for political reform, including electoral reform, in the midst of an economic crisis unprecedented in the history of the country