Politics in the Republic of Korea has undergone many changes after the democratization movement that swept the nation in 1987. One of the most notable changes is that the status of the National Assembly has significantly strengthened as it has emerged...
Politics in the Republic of Korea has undergone many changes after the democratization movement that swept the nation in 1987. One of the most notable changes is that the status of the National Assembly has significantly strengthened as it has emerged as the main national forum for power competition and policy-making. As a result, political parties have been engaging in fierce competition to assume leadership over the operations of the National Assembly. There have also been considerable changes in the distribution of leadership positions within the National Assembly, where the past practice of winner-takes-all has been replaced with the new principle of proportional distribution according to the results of negotiations and agreements.
The starting point of this thesis is an investigation into just what it was that brought about such changes in our political climate. This is followed by an analysis of why these negotiations tend to be prolonged or fall into deadlock, when the overall end result is almost always a distribution of leadership positions that accurately corresponds to the distribution of seats within the whole National Assembly. The thesis then provides an examination of what are the factors that bring such prolonged and deadlocked negotiations to eventual agreement.
This thesis attempts to provide evidential explanations to each of the aforementioned questions through empirical case-studies on the political parties'''' competition and conflict, negotiation and compromise surrounding the formation of congressional leadership during the 13th, 14th, 15th and 16th National Assemblies, all of which were elected into office after the democratization movement of 1987. The framework for analysis employed by the case studies is a dynamic model that assumes competing political parties carry out negotiations by making rational and strategic choices that work to maximize one''''s own interests and power. It is also assumed that during negotiations on the formation of congressional leadership, parties will definitely compete against one another to secure the largest number of leadership positions possible. At the same time, however, if such competition is too excessive and leads to the paralysis of the National Assembly, the public opinion will be extremely critical. To avoid the potential undoing of all political parties by such criticism and in the common interest of all parties to maintain the current political system, political parties are therefore assumed to engage in a degree of cooperation, in a procedure which can be characterized as an interdependent non-zero-sum game.
Following are the conclusions reached through this comparative analysis of negotiations on the formation of congressional leadership, carried out utilizing the abovementioned assumptions and framework for analysis.
First, in the post-1987 era, numerous parties with regional support bases were created, leading to a political situation in which the party gaining the most number of seats through general elections still was not able to gain a stable majority in the National Assembly. This, combined with the ever-changing composition of political parties, made previous practices in negotiations on the formation of congressional leadership quite useless, and forced political parties to compete with one another in their efforts to reach agreement through negotiations. As a result, the winner-takes-all approach for leadership positions was replaced by an approach that involved negotiations to reach agreement on the final distribution of leadership positions among the different political parties.
Second, having failed to secure a majority through the elections, in many instances the ruling party was compelled to form a coalition with other parties or to deploy strategies to bring in electees of other parties. The opposition, on its part, tended to rely on strategies that linked other agenda to the negotiations for leadership formation, thus using the negotiations as an opportunity to resolve pending political issues as well as to increase their stake in congressional leadership. Such provocative strategies of both the ruling and opposition parties led to deadlocks where one or the other would refuse or avoid negotiations.
Third, as rational actors seeking to maximize one''''s own interests, although political parties could delay negotiations as long as expected profits exceeded expected losses, with mounting public pressure greatly increasing the level of expected losses, political parties were forced to eventually desert their conflict strategies and work for a compromise to resolve the deadlock. The pressure of public opinion is deemed to be the critical factor for resolving deadlocks in congressional leadership negotiations.
Fourth, with such developments, in post-democratization Korea, power distribution in the National Assembly has changed from a winner-takes-all approach to the principle of negotiated proportional distribution of leadership positions. This has since been established as a precedent that is recognized by all parties as the unwritten law in the formation of congressional leadership. This does not seem to be a precedent that was automatically established as a consequence of changes in the composition of political parties, but one that was achieved through negotiation efforts built upon the complex interaction among changes in the composition of political parties, the negotiation context and the strategic choices made by all players involved in the negotiations.
To conclude, agreements played a larger and more important role than conflicts in the inter-party negotiations for the formation of congressional leadership in the post-democratization National Assembly. The way in which power is distributed in the National Assembly has thus changed. A winner-takes-all approach that is absolutely advantageous to the party with the most number of seats has since been replaced by a system of agreement through negotiations that allows the opinions of the minority parties to be reflected in the operations of the National Assembly. The people''s demand that the political parties share congressional power seems to have been heeded to by the members of the National Assembly.
With a close examination of negotiations on the formation of congressional leadership in post-democratization Korea through empirical participant observation and analysis consistent with the Rational Choice Theory, this thesis thus provides indicative evidence supporting the perspective that the post-1987 development of parliamentary politics in Korea was a combined process of power competition among political parties and the accommodation of pressures coming from public opinion.