Does Government Partisanship Matter in East Asian New Democracies? Parties, Inequality, and the Welfare State in South Korea and Taiwan

This paper examines whether goverment partisanship matters in East Asian new democracies. Specifically, we explore in what way economic inequality and welfare spending have been affected by government partisanship in South Korea and Taiwan. While many studies in comparative political economy of advanced democracies have found a strong impact of the partisan persuasion of the government on inequality and the welfare state, systematic studies in new democracies have been rare. Applying power resource theory, we test the effect of government partisanship on economic inequality and social policy in the two East Asian new democracies. Our statistical analysis finds that while government partisanship matters in South Korea, strong and long-standing partisan convergence on the issues of social protection and welfare provision in Taiwan makes government partisanship irrelevant in explaining variations in outcomes over time