Uk Heo and Hans Stockton, "The Impact of Democratic Transition on Elections and Parties in South Korea," Party Politics, 11 (November, 2005), 674-688.

First Paragraph:
Despite decades of repressive rule, South Korea's modern history of authoritarianism was complemented by a long history of electoral politics and limited pluralism. During the era of authoritarian rule from 1954 to 1987 (excluding a brief democratic interlude from 1960 to 1961), 10 National Assembly elections were held in which the ruling party won an average of 60 percent of legislative seats, though only 40 percent of the popular vote (Kang, 2001). This is a clear indication that the country's electoral systems were designed to provide limited political competition and representation, while at the same time ensuring ruling parties of 'legitimized' legislative majorities. Even the most dictatorial Korean leaders understood the importance of the legitimizing function of elections with regard to their domestic constituencies (and, it should be said, also with regard to American foreign policy preferences). Elections were designed not so much as to allow the people to determine the core national leadership as to provide a façade of democratic legitimacy.

Figures and Tables:
Table 1. Korea's National Assembly election results for main parties under authoritarianism
Table 2. Korea's National Assembly election results for main parties under democracy

Second Paragraph in Conclusion:
We have sought to go beyond the self-evident statement that political outputs would be different under democracy and have quantified some of the ways in which the authoritarian and democratic systems differ. The old order was designed to protect ruling party hegemony, maintain a stable presidential system and facilitate policy-making in the executive and legislative branches. We find that the Park and Chun regimes were able to engineer this to varying degrees of success and point to electoral system designs that may have influenced these differences. Before democratization, electoral law manipulation and the cleavage between urban and rural voters dominated Korean elections (Park, 2002). As a result, the governing party always enjoyed a majority in the National Assembly even if it gained fewer votes than the opposition. After democratization, however, electoral rules have changed and stabilized so as to allow opposition parties a fair chance to win elections, but the average life of political parties has shortened because of regionalism and personalism (Stockton and Heo, 2003).