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Political Parties and Electoral Strategy presents a new theoretical perspective on political party organization through the analytical framework of historical institutionalism. Within this framework, the book argues that to understand different types of political parties we need to acknowledge politicians' ability to develop different strategic responses to the electoral market in which they compete for votes. Different electoral strategies, in turn, require different organizational structures for their implementation. The idea of party organizations as instruments of electoral strategy is used to study the development of political parties in the new democracies of East Asia -- South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and Indonesia. Offering a wealth of new empirical information, this book will not only be of great interest to all scholars of political parties but also to those working on East Asian politics.

The 'failed state' frame equates the collapse of formal state institutions with violent anarchy and destructive chaos. By analysing newspaper imagery of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Somalia through a multi-method research design, this article shows that tabloid newspapers are significantly more likely to adopt the 'failed state' frame than broadsheet newspapers. Visual narratives in the latter, on the other hand, tend to shift the focus away from issues of violence and instability, emphasizing instead the ability of alternative forms of governance to organize social and economic life. Of wider significance, the article therefore also shows that tabloids feed Afro-pessimism discourses to a much greater extent than broadsheets, which visualize Africa in more positive terms.

This article argues that high levels of state capacity are not a sufficient condition for consolidating autocratic rule. Rather, whether non-democratic rulers can harness the infrastructural power of the state to implement strategies of regime stabilization depends on three crucial factors: the state's social embedding, the international context, and the extent of elite cohesion. The paper develops this argument through a case study of the military-bureaucratic regime in South Korea (1961-1987), which – despite a high-capacity "developmental" state at its disposal – failed to maintain high levels of resilience.

This article argues that high levels of state capacity are not a sufficient condition for consolidating autocratic rule. Rather, whether non-democratic rulers can harness the infrastructural power of the state to implement strategies of regime stabilization depends on three crucial factors: the state's social embedding; the international context; and the extent of elite cohesion. The paper develops this argument through a case study of the military–bureaucratic regime in South Korea (1961–1987), which – despite a high-capacity 'developmental' state at its disposal – failed to maintain high levels of resilience.

A new approach has emerged in the literature on corruption in the developing world that breaks with the assumption that corruption is driven by individualistic self-interest and, instead, conceptualizes corruption as an informal system of norms and practices. While this emerging neo-institutionalist approach has done much to further our understanding of corruption in the developing world, one key question has received relatively little attention: how do we explain differences in the institutionalization of corruption between developing countries? The paper here addresses this question through a systematic comparison of seven developing and newly industrialized countries in East Asia. The argument that emerges through this analysis is that historical sequencing mattered: countries in which the "political marketplace" had gone through a process of concentration before universal suffrage was introduced are now marked by less harmful types of corruption than countries where mass voting rights where rolled out in a context of fragmented political marketplaces. The paper concludes by demonstrating that this argument can be generalized to the developing world as a whole.

Formally institutionalized party organization is usually considered a prerequisite for the development of programmatic linkages between parties and voters. However, in this article I show that political parties in South Korea have succeeded in stabilizing interparty competition through programmatic linkages without making any significant efforts to build a formal organizational base. In fact, it could be argued that South Korea is a "partyless" democracy, as political parties get easily captured by the interests of ambitious politicians, thus failing to establish themselves as independent actors. I therefore make a more general argument about the concept of party system institutionalization: we need to rethink the current practice of aggregating the different attributes of party system institutionalization into a single scale, as these attributes do not seem to be connected in a linear fashion.