Divergent Trajectories: Healthcare Insurance Reforms in East Asia ...

Illan Nam, Colgate University, Feb 2011Draft in progress, please do not quote or citeinstitutionalized systems such as Taiwan, more than 40% of voters declared themselvesto be unattached to any party (Cheng). In part, this may reflect voters’ disenchantmentwith the KMT’s strong-arm tactics during the authoritarian era of manipulating electoraldistricting and other electoral rules that discredited the activities of political parties.Somewhat surprisingly, only 27% of Korean voters responded that they did not feel closeto any political party. However, their relatively higher level of attachment may reflectstrong provincial identities that bind them to a party whose leader was born in theirregion. Perhaps underscoring the tenuousness of partisan ties even among those whoprofessed an attachment, in all the East Asian countries, the overwhelming majority ofthose voters who identified themselves as “feeling close” to a political party also revealedthemselves to feel “just a little close” as opposed to “somewhat close” or “very close.”At the same time that Mainwaring and Scully’s index captures several importantmeasures of party system stability, it does not indicate other important characteristics ofparty systems that would affect the dynamics of party competition. One such indicator isthe extent to which party systems are nationalized. Jones and Mainwaring noted that thelevel of nationalization – or the extent to which a party’s vote share is consistent fromone region or province to another – is an important factor that shapes parties’ electoralstrategies. They claimed that “if the level of nationalization diverges sharply between[these] two systems, the competitive dynamics are quite different.” We would expectparties whose electoral strength is based on their dominance in certain regions to pursuedifferent strategies than those who have nationally consistent vote shares.I argue that variations in dimensions of party systems – institutionalization andregionalization – afforded parties different strategic opportunities to carve out electoral31