Transition pacts and party institutionalization in Korea and Taiwan

Transition pacts negatively affect party institutionalization through organizational incentives. When parties depend on state finance, hand their leaders outsized authority, and demobilize mass actors, they are unlikely to cultivate mass memberships, adhere to intraparty rules and norms, or descriptively represent salient social groups. These organizational qualities induce programmatic convergence, making politicians loath to take clear stances on polarizing public policies and precluding the articulation of distinctive party brands built around sets of programmatic issues. In doing so, transition pacts durably stunt the ideological party-society linkages that characterize institutionalized parties. A comparative analysis of party organizations in South Korea and Taiwan demonstrates that both between- and within-country differences in how parties organize, mobilize, and brand their parties follow directly from party-organizational incentives originating in transition pacts.