Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to examine the institutionalization process of East Asia during their land reform period, where their dual roles in accountability relations enable legitimate governance even under non-democratic settings.

Paper long abstract:

In underdeveloped countries where the principle source of capital is still mainly derived from agricultural outputs, land ownership is a crucial issue when it comes to social rearrangement. Although state transformation in such underdeveloped countries does not solely aim at gaining full democracy, their unique trajectory of gaining legitimacy and institutionalization with non-democratic features is worthwhile to observe. Thus, determinants for legitimation of institutionalization in underdeveloped countries with non-democratic settings can be found by examining the process of land reform, a socio-economic change that is large in terms of its scale and range of transformation. In this context, this paper aims to examine three East Asian countries (Japan, South Korea and Taiwan), during their state transformational period in the 1940s-50s, on their land reform and land institution formation process with a historical institutionalist approach. Their unique accountability relations among the government, rural land institutions and the stationed US institutions (GHQ SCAP/USAMGIK/JCRR) are expected to show how initial conditions of legitimate governance in underdeveloped countries can be devised through land reform. In addition, their dual roles in accountability relations can represent how institutionalization can be achieved even without fully democratized systems. Although the United States was existent in the region as an influential factor with the motivation to promote democratization and prevent communism, it can give implications to current developing countries as well since, autonomous reform is hard to achieve without influence from external actors.