The politics of prosecution service reform in new presidential democracies: The South Korea and Russia cases in comparative perspective

This paper explains why large-scale reform of a civil-law prosecution system will be abandoned, fail, or succeed in exceptional cases, focusing on the strategic interaction between an incumbent president and prosecutors, through a comparative analysis of the South Korea and Russia cases. A civil-law prosecution system could hardly be reformed, although there were several attempts to correct the politicization of the prosecution service, in new presidential democracies. An incumbent president sometimes considers major reform against the prosecutors, but he or she tends to abandon it and seek to form alliance with them, expecting short-term political benefits under intense political competition. Moreover, although a president strongly pushes for large-scale prosecution service reform, he or she also cannot easily achieve this goal, since the prosecutors' willful initiation of criminal proceedings will cause his or her momentum to decline. Indeed, only Putin exceptionally succeeded in major reform of the prosecution system under weak political competition, among South Korean and Russian Presidents after democratization.