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ABSTRACT
The article mainly seeks to explain the legislature’s preferences in social welfare before and after democratization using South Korea as a case study. Based on an original dataset that consists of all executive and of legislative branch-submitted bills between 1948 and 2016 – roughly 60,000– legislative priority on social welfare is compared over time, and tested using logistic regressions. The key focus of analysis is whether and how the level of democracy affected the degree and universality of social welfare priority. The findings show that the promotion of social welfare is positively related to higher levels of democracy in a continuous fashion, which clearly points to the need to avoid applying a simple regime dichotomy – authoritarian or democratic – when seeking to understand social welfare development. Going further, the article examines the legislature's priority in welfare issues within a presidential structure and under majoritarian electoral rule, at different levels of democracy. The result shows that the higher levels of democracy are, the more the legislative branch contributes to the overall salience of social welfare legislative initiatives as compared to the executive branch. Moreover, the legislative branch itself prioritizes a social welfare agenda – alongside democratic deepening – over other issues.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Thomas Richter, Elena Korshenko, Masaaki Higashijima, Sinan Chu, Sijeong lim and David Kuehn for helpful feedback on parts of the article. The suggestions of the two anonymous reviewers were particularly helpful. The research also benefited from presenting findings at International Conference on Global Dynamics of Social Policy and at Authoritarian Politics research team meeting of the German Institute of Global and Area Studies.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Ansell and Samuels, Inequality and Democratization. Haggard and Kaufmann, Development, Democracy, and Welfare States; Lindert, Growing Public; Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class.
2 De Mesquita et al., The Logic of Political.
3 Examining only successful bills is particularly misguided in understanding preference of political actors since how particular legislative attempts become successful is more likely to be a result of actors’ capacity or surrounding situations – such as experience and expertise on issues, size of the political coalition or government type (divided or unified). Furthermore, existing works have repeatedly confirmed that bill submission data can be used to examine legislators’ preferences. For example, Alenman et al., Explaining Policy Ties in Presidential Congress or Talbert and Potoski Setting the Legislative Agenda.
4 Knutsen and Rasmussen, The Autocratic Welfare State.
5 The scale ranges from 0 to 1, and the higher number indicates higher democracy. This is measured through five subcomponents: freedom of association, clean elections, freedom of expression, elected officials and suffrage.
6 Considering that the president is the head of the executive branch and the person who should sign each submitted bill, the cabinet-sponsored ones have been directly related to the specific preferences of dictators (or of democratically elected presidents after 1987). In contrast, legislator-sponsored bills incorporate the preferences of both ruling and opposition party members.
7 Except for a brief period in the early 1960s, Korean politics has had a presidential structure. Although Korea has had mixed electoral rules where legislators were elected from the district and party tiers both during the authoritarian and democracy period, the party tier was either minor in terms of the proportion (roughly 15–25 of the legislators were elected from here between 1988 and 2004) or designed to amplify majoritarian bias (half to two-thirds of the party-tier seats were allocated to the top-ranked party at the district tier between 1963 and 1972, and between 1980 and 1988).
8 A higher score indicates greater legislative independence. It is measured by legislative constraint scores with the expert judgment on the question: “To what extent are the legislature and government agencies (e.g. comptroller general, general prosecutor or ombudsman) capable of questioning, investigating and exercising oversight on the executive?”
9 Rimlinger, Welfare Policy and industrialization; Mares and Carnes “Social Policy in Developing.”
10 Huber and Stephens, Development and Crisis of Welfare State.
11 Ansell and Samuels, Inequality and Democratization. Haggard and Kaufmann, Development, Democracy, and Welfare States; Lindert, Growing Public; Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class).
12 Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class; Melzer and Richard.
13 Melzer and Richard, “A Rational Theory of.”
14 De Mesquita et al. The Logic of Political.
15 Knutsen and Rasmussen, “The Autocratic Welfare State”
16 Magaloni and Kricheli “Political Order and One-Party”; Erzow and Frantz, “Dicators and Dictatorships.”
17 Acemoglu and Robinson, Economic Origins of Democracy.
18 Knutsen and Rasmussen, “The Autocratic Welfare Sate.”
19 Ibid.
20 De Mesquita et al., The Logic of Political.
21 For example, see Person and Tabellin, “Comparative Politics and.”
22 Levitsky and Way, “The Rise of Competitive.”
23 Levitsky and Murillo, “Variation in Institutional Strength.”
24 Wright, “Do Authoritarian Institutions Constrain?”
25 Bonvecchi and Simison, “Legislative Institutions and Performance”
26 Malesky and Schuler, “Nodding or Needling”
27 Gandhi, Political Institutions under Dictatorship.
28 Magaloni, “Credible Power-Sharing”
29 Gandhi, Political Institutions under Dictatorship
30 Mayhew, Congress: The Electoral Connection.
31 Olson and Mezey, Leigslatures in the Policy
32 Eaton, “Parliamentarism versus Presidentialism”
33 Duverger, Political Parties; Downs, “An Economic Theory of Political Action in a Democracy.”
34 Gingrich, “Visibility, Values, and Voters”.
35 Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of.
36 Carroll, The Impact of Women.
37 Lijphart and Crepaz, “Corporatism and Consensus Democracy”
38 Gandhi, Political Institutions under Dictatorship.
39 Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism.
40 Until 2003, the threshold was 20 members in Korea. Although their number varies over time, there were 200–300 elected legislators during the period of observation meanwhile.
41 Of the National Legislation Search Centre, run by the Ministry of Justice. Accessible online at: http://www.law.go.kr/main.html.
42 Here, the definition of welfare is based on the broad boundaries covered in the modern comparative welfare state literature.
43 Gingrich, “Visibility, Values, and Voters.”
44 These specific distinctions are drawn from Gamm and Kousser, “Broad Bills or Particularistic.”
45 Significant welfare bills include those making changes such as increasing the amount of subsidy/loan/compensation; extending the benefit-receiving period; or, relaxing the benefit-receiving conditions – for example contribution period, benefit-receiving period. These resonate with the categories used in a well-established welfare state project, Comparative Welfare Entitlement Data, by Scruggs, Jahn and Kuitto (accessible online at: http://cwed2.org/). See the online appendix for further details.
46 With regards to the contents of expansion and retrenchment, this coding scheme is mainly drawn from social policy bill coding by Klitgaard and Elmelund-Præstekær, “Policy or Institution?” See the online appendix for further details.
47 To list few, the known political spectrum of affiliated parties after 1987 can be categorized as follows: centre-right (Grand National Party, Democratic Liberal Party, Democratic Justice Party, Liberal Democracy Coalition, Democratic Liberal Party, Pro-Park Coalition, Korea People Party, Korea Democracy Party); centre-left (Uri Party, United Democratic Party, Democratic Party, New Democratic Republic Party, Creative Korea Party, United Democratic Party, Democratic Peace Party, New Politics People’s Congress, New Korean Democratic Party); left (Democratic Labour Party, New Progressive Party); and others (independent and other small parties). This is treated as a multinominal variable, considering that ideological spectrum of independent legislators is uncertain.
48 Kwon, The welfare state in Korea; Peng and Wong, “East Asia”
49 See Author, for a review of this literature.
50 Svolik, “Power Sharing and Leadership.”
51 De Mesquitaet et al., The Logic of Political.
52 Kwon, The Welfare State in Korea.
53 Ibid.
54 Instead, the primary divide between the left and right revolves around the issue of taking a diplomatic or military stance towards North Korea; the relationship to the US is also a key point of demarcation. The left/right favours a more dovish/hawkish approach to North Korea, while holding a position of less dependence/dependence on the US too.
55 For example, Kim et al., Changing Cleavage Structure in New Democracies, Huber and Inglehart, Expert Interpretations of Party Space and Party Locations.
56 Wong, Healthy Democracies.
57 Bonvecchi and Simison, “Legislative Institutions and Performance”; Malesky and Schuler, “Nodding or Needling.”
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jaemin Shim
Dr. Shim is currently a Thyssen post-doctoral research fellow at German Institute of Global and Area Studie. He has received a PhD in Politics at the University of Oxford and his primary research interests lie in welfare states, political institutions, and legislative politics. His dissertation “Welfare Politics in Northeast Asia: An Analysis of Welfare Legislation Patterns in South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan” investigates how changing power structure affect incentives and constraints of elected politicians and elite bureaucrats in supporting different types of welfare bills by applying both quantitative and qualitative methods to his original dataset. His wider work covers gender politics, party politics, and mass-elite representation gap.
