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

• Author: Sachsenroeder, Wolfgang
• Position: Book review

Political Parties and Electoral Strategy: The Development of Party Organization in East Asia. By Olli Hellmann. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Hardcover: 199pp.

When Adam Przeworsky, about a decade ago, warned that we still do not understand political parties very well, and that this important topic had been neglected, the political science community, apart from scholars building on Mainwaring and Scully's 1995 seminal work on party institutionalization in Latin America, did not react immediately with concrete studies of how political parties work on the ground. This is especially true when it comes to the study of Asian political parties, which is why Hellman's new book--which covers South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia and the Philippines--is so timely and important.

Like most of the political party literature, which tends to be top-heavy with theoretical and methodological debates, Hellmann convincingly introduces over some thirty pages his "historical institutionalist" approach as a more holistic perspective and sensible compromise between competing schools of thought in party theory. And, fortunately, the warning of Sherlock Holmes--that it is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data, because one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts--has been well heeded by the author. He does have data, sometimes in breathtaking amounts and details on sixteen parties in the four countries he covers, but whether all these data details are necessary for Hellman's scholarly purposes may be debatable. Knowing all the factions and their political leaders by name and when they won against their rivals and by which strategy in the ever changing big chameleon parties of South Korea may not always explain the outcomes. Especially during the era of the "three Kims", with their complete control over funds and candidate nominations, internal party factions had little impact. The Kims' dominating power neutralized nearly all attempts to oppose them by organizational or programmatic strategies until their lame duck-phase at the end.

In Taiwan, where Hellman covers the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) as the two dominant parties, their internal factions played a bigger role in shaping not only election strategies but also their organizational changes and developments. And he shows convincingly how the parties and factions within them fought over the central issue of cross-straits...