The Political Dynamics of Korean-style Presidential Coalition Government

This paper aims to empirically analyze the political dynamics from the “Three-Party Merger” in 1990 to the nomination of Kim Young-sam as the presidential candidate of the Democratic Liberal Party (DLP) in 1992 in South Korea, based on a consistent framework grounded in theoretical perspectives on inter-party (electoral) alliances and coalition governments under presidentialism. Through this analysis, this seeks to provide an answer to the question of why coalition governments are relatively less sustainable in presidential systems compared to parliamentary ones. The “Three-Party Merger” also inherently contained certain characteristics of an inter-party alliance accompanied by the ideological and policy alignment of a grand conservative alliance, as well as a coalition government based on this foundation. However, it was much more the result of strategic choices stemming from power-seeking motives, particularly for winning the next presidency, of the Democratic Justice Party, the Reunification Democratic Party, and the New Democratic Republican Party, and their leaders, Roh Tae-woo, Kim Young-sam, and Kim Jong-pil, primarily based on political regionalism. Therefore, the ruling DLP as a sort of inter-party alliance inevitably faced significant internal instability over which faction would secure the presidential candidacy for the next election, and consequently the party underwent a partial disintegration due to the defection of several key figures from the Minjung(former Democratic Justice Party) faction who failed to achieve its goal. This suggests that in a presidential system, in the absence of a multiparty system with distinct ideological and policy differences, even if a coalition government is formed once, it is highly likely to split again before the next presidential election.