Democratic Transition and Institutional Crafting: The South Korean Case

The article first analyses the critical events leading up to democratic transition in South Korea and then examines the choices made regarding the new democratic rules during autumn 1987. Earlier studies have focused mainly on the new rules themselves, but few have analyzed the actual crafting process. This study remedies that oversight as it investigates not only what lay behind the choices made regarding institutional crafting, but also how the new rules shaped the founding elections of the new democracy. The article argues that some of the difficulties that South Korea has experienced in consolidating its democracy may in fact be due to flaws in the institutional crafting process during democratic transition. As such the South Korean case shows that the type of democratic transition may place certain restrictions on the comprehensive approach needed for an institutional crafting process that must go beyond the immediate electoral considerations of individual political leaders. It shows that close co-operation among oppositional forces is essential when during democratic transition institutional crafting takes place. The article reaches the conclusion that if these issues had been addressed in 1987, the alternation in power that occurred in late 1997 would probably have happened sooner.