A stimulating new book examines the effect elections have had on Taiwan's emerging democracy, long tarnished by factional strife and the evils of "black-and-gold" politics.
The March 2000 presidential election certainly marked a watershed in Taiwan's political history. The victory of Chen Shui-bian of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ended the Kuomintang's (KMT) monopoly of power over the central government during the entire postwar period, although the KMT still holds a tenuous majority in the legislature. In addition, the KMT's long-vaunted "patronage machine" quite clearly failed miserably in turning out the vote, implying that another important change in the island's politics has occurred.
More broadly, the election strongly indicated that Taiwan has reached the stage of "democratic consolidation," that is to say, the outcomes of political competition through free and fair elections are now generally accepted as legitimate by both the general public and all major leadership groups. The change of administration proceeded smoothly in May; and, despite the fact that Chen won with only 39 percent of the vote in a bitter three-way race, his victory was greeted with approval by an overwhelming majority of the citizenry.
The dramatic reforms of the late 1980s and early 1990s that transformed the Republic of China on Taiwan from an authoritarian one-party state to a democratic polity, therefore, can well be called a "political miracle" matching the earlier, much touted "economic miracle." Across the political spectrum, leaders and citizens appear quite proud of Taiwan's becom ing the first democracy in 5,000 years of Chinese society and display little sympathy for Lee Kuan Yew's or Jiang Zemin's championing of an "Asian democracy" that restricts Western-proclaimed political rights as incompatible with indigenous Asian cultures. Consequently, Taiwan's experience with a smooth and successful democratic transition should be of interest not just to those who follow politics in the ROC, but more generally to anyone concerned with the recent "third wave" of democratization worldwide.
Shelley Rigger, the Brown Associate Professor of Political Science at Davidson College, is exceptionally well qualified to analyze democratization on Taiwan. She has written extensively on domestic and electoral politics in the Republic of China, based on extensive research conducted in Taiwan. Of especial note, given Chen's recent victory, she is perhaps the leading scholar in the United States on both the DPP and Taiwan's local patronage politics. In Politics in Taiwan: Voting for Democracy, Professor Rigger provides an excellent analysis of Taiwan's democratization.
At one level, the book contains a concise and balanced description of Taiwan's political history during the postwar era after the Nationalist Party evacuated to the island, having lost the civil war on the Chinese mainland to Mao Zedong's Communists. Politics in Taiwan summarizes the major stages in Taiwan's political development thus: 1) highly authoritarian KMT rule during the 1950s and 1960s; 2) gradual political reforms over the 1970s and early 1980s; and 3) the democratic transition itself, which commenced in 1986 with the formation of a major opposition party, the DPP, in defiance of the existing martial law. The book is informed, insightful, and quite readable and thus can be recommended to both the general public and to teachers interested in texts for courses on East Asian politics or democratization.
Rigger's work goes far beyond a good political history of Taiwan, however. In fact, she makes two further valuable contributions to the analysis of the island's politics. First, she develops what I believe is a unique model for Taiwan that places the dynamics of elections at the center of the explanation for the country's democratization (hence, the subtitle of Voting for Democracy), which is usually conceptualized in terms of such variables as the island's rapid modernization, leadership strategies within the KMT, and the interactions between the Kuomintang and the opposition. Rigger's second distinctive contribution in Politics in Taiwan is to provide by far the most extensive and sophisticated analysis available in English of the politics of local factions in Taiwan. In combination, these two signal contributions make the book almost required reading for anybody who wants a full understanding of politics in the ROC.
Rigger develops her model of Taiwan's democratic transition by generalizing from Bolivar Lamounier's analysis of the political history of Brazil. At the abstract level, this theory argues that even authoritarian regimes try to develop popular legitimacy and support. One way of doing this is to allow limited local elections which do not threaten the power of the central government. This "opening through elections," however, can set off much more dramatic dynamics in the long run. In particular, elections legitimize political activity by opposition forces, permit new issues (including democratization itself) to be placed on the nation's political agenda, and strengthen the hand of reformers within the regime. Over time, these processes cumulate to generate increasing pressure for greater political reforms and, ultimately, the transformation from authoritarian to democratic politics.
Voting for Democracy applies this abstract model to Taiwan with considerable insight. When the Kuomintang was forced to retreat to Taiwan at the end of the Chinese Civil War, Chiang Kai-shek instituted a three-pronged strategy for legitimizing the regime on the island, in line with the chief elements of Sun Yat-sen's "Three Principles of the People": 1) the planned recovery of the mainland enshrined "nationalism," 2) economic development promoted "people's livelihood," and 3) local elections represented a step in "tutelary democracy."
In terms of the latter goal, the recently passed Temporary Provisions of the Constitution provided a "firewall" that guaranteed the KMT's monopoly of political power by prohibiting the formation of new political parties and freezing the composition of the Legislative Yuan (national parliament) and National Assembly (electoral college for the President and forum for constitutional change) until their incumbents could run for reelection in their districts throughout China.
Given this firewall, the institution of local elections allowed the central KMT to integrate local political forces and factions into the regime and the ruling party without fear of a hostile takeover. Furthermore, Taiwan already had an electoral system that facilitated the KMT's then objectives. Local elections had first been permitted in the mid-1930s, during the colonial period, by the Japanese, who evidently hoped to augment their legitimacy after their invasion of China. They created a system of voting, similar to the one in the imperial center, based on a "single nontransferable vote in multimember districts" that is still used in Taiwan today. Such a system creates intense competition for votes, thereby leading to factionalism (which helped the Japanese by splintering Taiwanese political leaders and forces).
The central Kuomintang retained this system and explicitly pursued a "divide-and-rule" strategy of playing local fac tions off against one another and trying to ensure that no single faction ever became completely dominant in a county or locality. These local factions were primarily cliental in nature, with village tiau-a-ka (or "ward bosses") mobilizing votes for one faction or another.
Over time, these local elections generated increasing pressures to democratize the system. In terms of general legitimacy, their very success raised the question of why democratic elections should not be applied to the top levels of the polity. They also provided a venue for the opposition to criticize the regime (especially for its lack of democracy), while allowing opposition leaders enough success to keep them "within the system." Finally, electoral politicians inside the KMT became strong advocates of further reform; and the need to gather votes decentralized the ruling party, thereby undercutting authoritarian central controls.
The strategy of playing competing factions off against one another also began to generate some ambiguous results for the KMT. It had the short-term advantage of ensuring huge majorities for the ruling party, but also possessed the long-term disadvantage of limiting direct control over factional leaders whose primary loyalties were to themselves. For example, the first broad-based win by unofficial opposition candidates occurred in 1977, when the central KMT tried to downgrade the power of local factions by fielding "high quality" candidates, setting off internecine conflict that greatly hurt the party at the polls.
The importance of local factions and the patronage politics associated with them, moreover, had become increasingly controversial by the 1990s, as the public became resentful over political corruption, sometimes called "black-and-gold poli tics." In fact, popular revulsion against corruption almost certainly contributed to Chen Shui-bian's winning the presidency in 2000.
Voting for Democracy also suggests several broader insights about the successful democratic transition in the ROC. First, as theory in comparative politics has increasingly emphasized, "institutions matter." That is, particular laws and forms of organization channel political activities and competition in specific directions, thereby shaping political outcomes and policies. This can be seen, for example, in the way that Taiwan's electoral system first supported but ultimately undermined authoritarian control by the central KMT party-state.
Initially, the KMT used the system to cement its power as the balance wheel in the patronage system. However, as Rigger insightfully notes, the very electoral system, which seemed conducive to patronage politics for the first three decades of Kuomintang rule, by permitting control of a relatively small number of votes by local factions and tiau-a-ka to ensure victory, contained the seeds of its own destruction. That was because it rewarded the "issue" appeals of the opposition to significant but relatively small groups in many election districts, for example, supporters of Taiwan independence.
In particular, legislative victories in the early 1980s by the wives and defense lawyers of the dissidents jailed following the violent Kaohsiung Incident both indicated popular opposition to political repression and made maintaining the patronage system increasingly difficult in the face of this enhanced competition for votes.
A second important insight is that the evolution of local factionalism also illustrates the point (which advocates of democracy often ignore) that political reforms can have both positive and negative consequences. The enhanced competition from the emerging opposition put increasing pressure on local factions to look after their own interests, rather than obeying central directives, in order to preserve their power and patronage bases. As Rigger argues, this had two very different impli cations for democratization in Taiwan.
On the one hand, local factions increasingly resisted the control of the central KMT authorities, most notably in the key 1989 elections, thereby promoting democracy by creating much greater "pluralism" in the political realm. On the other hand, the KMT's increasingly desperate and blatant practice (often in league with organized crime) of black-and-gold politics disgusted much of the citizenry. Indeed, Rigger's spotlighting of these contradictory effects turned out to be prophetic for the 2000 presidential election, when the KMT scored a Pyrrhic victory by managing to enmire James Soong in a scandal involv ing his finances. Independent Soong's campaign was clearly staggered, but he had been a KMT stalwart for too long for his former party to escape the consequences: By attacking Soong, it merely managed to underscore its own longstanding ties to black-and-gold politics in the minds of the voters.
More fundamentally, this conceptualization of the democratization of the Republic of China on Taiwan emphasizes that a "democracy with Chinese characters" has indeed been created. Despite the arguments of Lee Kuan Yew and Jiang Zemin that democracy is an alien institution incompatible with Confucian culture and government, Shelley Rigger's book conclu sively demonstrates that the various political groups and forces in postwar Taiwan have taken a set of formal political struc tures and shaped them to their own needs. The 2000 presidential election and the uneventful transfer of power prove beyond any reasonable doubt that democracy has been consolidated in Taiwan, and that this polity has the almost universal support of its citizens. Such an accomplishment should greatly strengthen the legitimacy of Taiwan's government, both domestically and internationally.
Cal Clark is an Alumni Professor of Political
Science at Auburn University whose primary
field of research is East Asian political economy.
His most recent books are Comparing
Development Patterns in Asia (co-author, 1997),
The ROC on the Threshold of the 21st Century
(co-editor with Chao Chien-min, 1999), and
Democracy and the Status of Women in East
Asia (co-editor, 2000).
Copyright 2000 by Cal Clark.