Acknowledging the importance of diverse political institutions in explaining party system fragmentation, this is the first attempt to extend the existing perspective on local elections to legislative elections under a ‘single-member simple-plurality electoral system in a decentralized unitary context’. The importance of electoral competition patterns in local elections is assessed to determine electoral multipartism in a given district in legislative elections. The unit of analysis is thus the ‘electoral district’ in which a legislative election under an SMSP is basically held. With evidence from the Korean case, it is argued that ‘local/district partisan characteristics’ - different levels of partisan strength and subsequent partisan fragmentation - influence the degree of electoral multipartism in legislative elections across districts, while all other district-level factors are held constant. The findings suggest that we need to consider sub-national and sub-provincial local elections if we are to obtain a systematic understanding of electoral multipartism in legislative elections.
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