Women remain politically underrepresented in Asia, comprising an average of 18.8% of parliament seats, which is slightly below the global average of 21.9% (IPU 2014). Korea is one of the countries in the region where the women’s movement initiated the quota debate early on, realizing the importance of women’s political representation after democratization. Political leaders were attracted to the idea of gender quotas in order to gain public recognition for undertaking political reforms, although they lacked a clear vision as to what specific strategies need to be implemented to work towards women’s political representation in the long-run (Yoon and Shin N. D.). As a result, legislative gender quotas were adopted in Korea for the first time in the year 2000. Yet, the impact of gender quotas on descriptive representation in the country has so far been limited (Shin 2014). Specifically, political parties consistently resist to conform to quotas and are passive in strengthening enforcement measures associated with non-compliance. Furthermore, in the case of local parliamentary elections, there is continued discussion of electoral reforms to strengthen grassroots democracy. One of the reform proposals include abolishing party nomination in municipal elections to ensure that local politics remains autonomous from nationalized party organizations. If the reform is successful, however, it would make it impossible to apply current quota policies—implemented at the party level—to municipal elections. Using election data since the adoption of quotas in 2000, we investigate how quota policies and electoral reforms have positively contributed to the descriptive representation of women in local politics. At the same time, our paper shows that party resistance to quotas and public support for electoral reforms present difficulties in institutionalizing quota policies in local elections. Overall, we discuss potential challenges associated with the continued presence of quota policies in the country.
