Is Fairness Enough? The Politics of Regulating Elections in a New Democracy

Establishing an effective legal framework for regulating elections is widely considered a priority for new democracies. Electoral regulation, though, can be profoundly political. Writing on democratization has given scant attention to the tension between the establishment of proper procedures and regulation itself becoming a means of contestation. I address this gap by examining the transformation of electoral regulation from authoritarianism to democracy in South Korea, a country widely considered a successful new democracy. I argue that South Korea’s national party leaders and other state actors have used regulation to fight potential rivals, and I offer an explanation for why they have been able to do so. My explanation begins with the premise that political struggles over electoral regulation in a new democracy depend on the ways regulatory institutions operated under authoritarianism and on the interests of powerful actors in reforming those institutions. I show how the democratic bargain of fairness between South Korea’s major parties served as the basis for cooperation among elites within those parties to adapt authoritarian-era regulatory institutions for the purpose of diminishing the electoral chances of other political actors. This study questions the conventional wisdom that a democratic transition necessarily wipes away elite manipulation of elections.