Political Parties and Political Development in South Korea

A REVIEW OF RECENT studies on South Korean politics indicates that there have been really no systematic attempts either to study parties empirically or to view them analytically in the context of For example, one is struck with the inadequate attention given to the vital question of why parties in South Korea have been so ineffective in the process of and social change. This article attempts to fill some of these gaps. It is generally agreed that the origin of parties is closely bound up with the general process of modernization and that the degree of development of a party system can serve as a useful institutional index of a level of development.1 To be sure, there exists a wide variety of assumptions about the meaning of and the attempt to devise a unified and objective conception of development is not an easy task. Despite increasing acceptance of the term political development, or political modernization, in recent years, its currency is still not universal even among scholars, and its meaning is not always made precise by those who accept the word.2 But there is nothing to be gained at this point by attempting a systematic definition of the term political development. For the moment it is probably most useful to isolate some selected problems of such as the crisis of participation.3 For it is precisely in this area that parties can play a crucial role by linking the individual citizen to the government. Thus the emergence of a party, whether in democratic or totalitarian systems, clearly implies that the masses must be taken into consideration by the ruling group. What is im-