South Korea is one of the few East Asian countries in which candidate gender quotas are legislated for all levels of government. However, the implementation of quotas has been only partially successful as political parties do not comply with quota laws in the majoritarian tier of the country’s mixed-member electoral system. To explain this non-compliance, this article examines how Korea’s party organizations and candidate selection practices have subverted quota implementation. More specifically, we employ Rahat and Hazan’s framework that disaggregates candidate selection processes into four areas—the selectorate, candidacy, centralization, and voting vs. appointment—and examine how two major Korean parties have chosen their candidates in the last three elections. By doing so, we demonstrate that in Korea’s under-institutionalized parties, where party organizations have been overshadowed by individual personalities, implementation of quotas can easily be subordinated to the clientelistic incentives of party leaders. While the parties’ centralized and exclusionary candidate selection procedures give party leaders a great deal of latitude to implement quotas, a better gender balance in the set of candidates is rarely a top priority for leaders in parties where personalism prevails. We argue that this explains why the quotas in Korea have been ineffective.
韩国政党的性别配额和候选人遴选过程
关键词： 性别配额，候选人遴选，恩庇-侍从主义，政党制度化，女性的政治代表，韩国。
韩国是立法在各级政府中实行候选人性别配额的少数几个东亚国家之一。然而迄今为止韩国性别配额的执行只能说是取得了部分成功，因为该国混合制选举体制下实行一党多数选举制的选举部分中，政党并不遵守配额法的规定。为解释这一违背法律的现象，本论文考察了韩国政党组织和候选人遴选实践是如何颠覆了配额制的实施的。更具体来说，我们使用了拉哈特和哈赞的理论框架，将候选人遴选过程分解为四个领域: 遴选人、候选资格、集中化，以及选举还是指定，并考察了在最近三次选举中韩国两大主要政党是如何选出它们的候选人的。据此，我们表明在韩国制度化不足的政党中，政党组织被个人性格好恶所左右，配额规定的执行轻易会屈从于政党领袖的恩庇-侍从性的动机。尽管政党的集中化和排他性的候选人遴选过程赋予政党领袖在执行性别配额上极大的便利，然而在领袖个人人格至高无上的政党中，政党领袖极少会将改进候选人之间的性别平衡当作优先考量的目标。我们认为这是性别配额在韩国未发挥有效作用的原因。
Translated from English by Li Guo
