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Party Politics
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Party Behaviour in the Parliamentary Arena

The Case of the Korean National Assembly

Simon Hix

London School of Economics and Political Science, s.hix{at}lse.ac.uk

Hae-Won Jun

Sogang Institute for Political Studies and visiting scholar at the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security in Seoul, haewonjun{at}empal.com

This article investigates the nature of party behaviour in the legislative arena in a developing democracy by undertaking a spatial analysis of voting in the Korean National Assembly. We discover the main dimensions of politics in the Korean parliament and look at how KNA members’ ideological preferences, regional interests and the shift from divided to unified government shapes relations between parties in this chamber. We find that party behaviour in the KNA is primarily ideologically based around a ‘progressive—conservative’ dimension of South Korean politics. However, we find that the geopolitical element of the progressive—conservative divide in Korean politics is more salient in the KNA than the socio-economic (left—right) element. We also find more division between the parties in the 17th KNA than in the 16th KNA, but this had less to do with ideological splits than the fact that the main progressive party (Uri) held the presidency and a majority in the parliament for the first time.

Key Words: legislators • party systems • roll-call voting • South Korea

Party Politics, Vol. 15, No. 6, 667-694 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1354068809334555
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