Party Organization, Accountability, and Democratic Resilience in Northeast Asia. Evidence from Mongolia, South Korea, and Taiwan

Abstract Why do democracies differ in their capacity to activate accountability mechanisms in response to challenges to democratic institutions? This article argues that part of the answer lies in the internal organization of political parties. Existing research emphasizes horizontal, vertical, and diagonal accountability mechanisms as central to democratic resilience, but insufficiently theorizes the conditions under which these mechanisms are activated. We argue that party organization constitutes an important conditioning factor in accountability activation: by shaping elite incentives and capacities, it affects whether accountability mechanisms are mobilized early and institutionally or only late and crisis-driven. Using a deductive causal process-tracing design, the article compares Mongolia, South Korea, and Taiwan. The analysis shows that collegial party organization facilitates early horizontal accountability and preventive resilience in Taiwan; personalized party organization contributes to delayed accountability and reactive resilience in South Korea; and centralized-hierarchical party organization under recurrent dominant-party conditions contributes to episodic accountability and fragile resilience in Mongolia. The findings refine democratic resilience theory by identifying party organization as an important organizational condition shaping the sequencing of accountability.