Political Parties and Electoral Strategy: The Development of Party Organization in East Asia

Abstract

Political Parties and Electoral Strategy presents a new theoretical perspective on political party organization through the analytical framework of historical institutionalism. Within this framework, the book argues that to understand different types of political parties we need to acknowledge politicians' ability to develop different strategic responses to the electoral market in which they compete for votes. Different electoral strategies, in turn, require different organizational structures for their implementation. The idea of party organizations as instruments of electoral strategy is used to study the development of political parties in the new democracies of East Asia – South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and Indonesia. Offering a wealth of new empirical information, this book will not only be of great interest to all scholars of political parties but also to those working on East Asian politics.