In this paper, we study how political parties react to democratic transitions. We find that the structure of legislators’ social networks plays a critical role in shaping their political interactions during the transition period, and consequently, the post-transition party systems that emerge. We focus on the Korean case, where the incumbent authoritarian party merged with one of its pro-democracy opponents to create a powerful and enduring conservative party under democratic rule. Using a novel individual-level dataset on all legislative members during the transition, we find that the merger was facilitated by dense social networks linking members of the merged parties, which increased trust across the parties and reduced the difficulty of a merger. Conversely, we find that the paucity of ties linking pro-democracy parties hindered their long-term cooperation, despite their shared ideologies and policy goals. The study complements existing theories by providing a network-based explanation for the weakly institutionalized political party system that has characterized Korean politics since democratization.

中文翻译：

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社交网络作为一种政治资源：重新审视韩国民主转型

在本文中，我们研究政党如何应对民主转型。我们发现，立法者的社交网络结构在塑造他们在过渡时期的政治互动以及因此而出现的过渡后政党制度方面发挥着关键作用。我们专注于韩国的案例，在该案例中，现任威权政党与其亲民主的反对者之一合并，在民主统治下创建了一个强大而持久的保守党。在过渡期间使用所有立法成员的新的个人级别数据集，我们发现合并是由连接合并各方成员的密集社交网络促进的，这增加了各方之间的信任并降低了合并的难度。反过来，我们发现，尽管民主派有共同的意识形态和政策目标，但缺乏联系民主派政党的联系阻碍了他们的长期合作。该研究通过提供基于网络的解释来补充现有理论，以解释自民主化以来韩国政治的制度化薄弱的政党制度。