A new book of essays on Taiwan’s vote-casting experience puts the recent popular election of the ROC president in historical perspective, showing many steps in the process that gave rise to the world’s frist Chinese democracy.
Taiwan's Electoral Politics and Democratic Transition: Riding the Third Wave, Hung-mao Tien, ed., foreword by Robert. Scalapino. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1996, 253 pp., pbk. ISBN 1-56324-671-6.
This collection of original essays on recent Taiwan politics is the eleventh and lastest volume in M.E. Sharpe’s trailblazing series, “Taiwan in the Modern World.” The book is especially timely, for it appeared not long before the first-ever popular election of the ROC president on March 23, an historic act of suffrage. The event promoted civic pride and drew unprecedented global media attention, particularly because of a series of nearby war games and missile tests by the People's Republic of China. Beijing's military threats, coupled with a huge propaganda barrage, much of it aimed at President Lee Tung-hui, not only failed to discourage Taiwan residents from flocking to the polls (76 percent of the eligible voters cast ballots) , but also drew worldwide attention to the contrast in political systems across the Taiwan Strait.
This election was unique only in one sense: it was the first time in 5, 000 years that the head of a Chinese polity was popularly elected. Despite the obvious political and psychological significance of this event, much else lies behind it. If looked at historically, the election can be seen as the culmination of a decades-long period of “political tutelage,” a concept promoted by Sun Yat-sen, who became the father of modern China at the end of the Ching dynasty in 1911. After the fall of Mainland China to the communists and the relocation of the ROC government to Taiwan in 1949, “political tutelage” came to mean a long period of tight, centralized political control. Nevertheless, numerous democratic forms took root, some of them prompted at first by local elections. One measure—though certainly not the only one—of Taiwan's remarkable political transformation from an authoritarian one-party state into a democratic multiparty polity is its long record of election experience.
The ten chapters of this book are based on papers presented at a 1994 conference at The George Washington Uni versity that focused for the most part on the significance of Taiwan's 1992 Legislative Yuan elections and the 1993 poll for county magistrates and city mayors. Thus, because this book was published prior to the March presidential election, it has nothing to say about that recent exercise in democracy, much less serve as an analysis of the candidates, parties, strategies, or election results. The chapters do, however, identify the basic trends and conditions that not only provided the context for direct presidential elections, but also foreshadowed the developments that are bringing about a sophisticated democratic polity in Taiwan.
The editor of this timely volume is political scientist Hung-mao Tien, one of the foremost scholars of Taiwan politics. Besides teaching, writing, and lecturing widely on Taiwan-related issues, Tien serves as president of the Institute for National Policy Research, an influential think tank based in Taipei. His book, The Great Transition: Political and Social Change in the Republic of China (Stanford: Hoover Institution, 1989) , established his credentials as an analyst with deep and comprehensive insights into the half-century that has taken Taiwan from so-called hard authoritarianism, via soft authoritarianism, to being a modern democracy.
In the first chapter of this volume, “Elections and Taiwan's Democratic Development, " Tien summarizes many of the factors that led to Taiwan's democratization. Tien first traces elections at the local level from 1959 to 1971, and the limited competitive national elections from 1972 to 1985. He then turns to the dramatic recasting of the Legislative Yuan and National Assembly after the formation of an opposition party—the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)—in late 1986 and the lifting of martial law in July 1987. This period of political development has been characterized by a rapidly changing mulitiparty system, a process in which the Kuomintang (KMT) has experienced a significant erosion of its long-established power base.
Since 1986, Taiwan has held eight major elections. Each of them contributed something uniquely significant to the gradual devolution of power from the ruling KMT to a multiparty system competing for control at all levels of government local, provincial, and national. In retrospect, no one of these elections was sufficient by itself to introduce or sustain the democratic transition, but all were instrumental in that transition's unfolding, the following summary indicates.
1986: An identifiable but unnamed opposition (called at that time the tangwai, literally“outside the party”) contests several supplementary seats in the Legislative Yuan and National Assembly.
1989: The DPP, a bona fide opposition party, formally appears on the ballot for the first time and wins seats in the Legislative Yuan and several county magistrate and city mayor positions.
1991: The ruling KMT retains a very large majority in the National Assembly, which then amends the constitution to promote several democratic reforms.
1992: The DPP wins more than 30 percent of the vote in the Legislative Yuan election.
1993: The DPP holds on to one-third of the magistracies and mayoralties, continuing its control of offices first won in 1989.
1994: A DPP candidate is elected mayor of Taipei; KMT candidates become the elected provincial governor and the mayor of Kaohsiung. Two of these winners are natives of Taiwan, one of Mainland China.
1995: The ruling party loses its large majority in the Legislative Yuan, barely retaining a three-seat majority.
1996: The ruling party suffers a similar decline in National Assembly elections, but wins the first presidential election by a landslide (54 percent of the vote in a field of four presidential candidates).
Most of the authors in this collection concentrate on the 1992 election, the first one in which all members of the Legislative Yuan were elected by residents of the “free area of the Republic of China,” and on the 1993 election, in which voters rendered judgment on the performance of DPP magistrates and city mayors. Their analyses of both elections use a range of research methods and techniques that help us understand some of the dynamics of the 1996 presidential and National Assembly votes. For example, “Political Values in Taiwan: Sources of Change and Constancy, " by University of Chicago sociologists William L. Parish and Charles Chi-hsiang Chang, demonstrate the merit of sophisticated sampling and interview procedures. And political scientist Bruce Dickson of George Washington University in Kuomintang before Democratization: Organizational Change and the Role of Elections, " shows that combing hard-to-come-by primary sources to provide historical context can pay off analytically.
To think of Taiwan’s democratic transition as a set of elections rather than a single event does more than emphasize the gradualness of the devolution of power that has taken place in recent years. It also encourages one to identify the multiple factors behind the successful introduction of power-sharing innovations. Such an approach suggests that a different outcome at any one stage might have slowed, but would not necessarily have stopped, the transition from authoritarianism to democracy. Similarly, it becomes clear that the continued consolidation of democracy is not guaranteed. Elections are periodic events; democracy is every day. The survival of democracy remains dependent on a continuing renewal of democratic processes, of which free and open elections are a crucial part.
These general observations translate into three propositions supported by research contained in this volume:
- Taiwan is likely to retain a multipartysystem.
- Parties stimulate, discover, and channel voter preferences in sophisticated ways, and they inevitably shape collective decisions.
- Democratic practices and institutions in Taiwan, far from being finalized, remain in a continuing state of flux.
The March 1996 elections for president and the National Assembly will in due course undergo the same sort of scholarly criticism as their predecessors. But first observations support the continuing pertinence of what we know from studying Taiwan's previous elections. For instance, the rise of several political parties in Taiwan stemmed in some measure from the unusual method of election adopted on the mainland in the late 1940s and introduced simultaneously in Taiwan. This method provides that members of legislative bodies shall be elected from regional districts, usually coterminous with city and county boundaries. Each district elects several members, but voters cast only one vote. The candidates with the highest number of votes take office, the number of seats depending on how many have been as signed to the district. Under this system, winning candidates rarely obtain an overall majority: pluralities generally range widely from small to less than 50 percent.
The number of seats assigned to National Assembly districts, for example, varies from two to ten, with three or four being the typical size. Legislative Yuan districts are geographically larger and include five single-seat districts, but constituencies with four to six seats are typical. Similar patterns prevail in elections for the provincial assembly and city and county councils.
Political scientist John Fuh-sheng Hsieh of National Chengchi University contributes a chapter describing the application of the multimember, single-vote method to Taiwan. The larger the number of seats in a district, he points out, the smaller the plurality needed for a candidate to win election. This mathematical fact of political life encourages small parties to form and then nominate only a few candidates. In this way, a relatively limited number of voters can still band together to bring about the election of a candidate.
In the early days of party competition in Taiwan, restrictions on free speech and the availability of special advantages to the KMT made it unlikely that the ruling party could be seriously challenged. As the reforms initiated by Chiang Ching-kuo and Lee Teng-hui began to take effect, however, the DPP got a foothold in 1989, then consolidated it in 1992. As the recent Na tional Assembly results show, the party has managed to maintain its position in 1996.
How the DPP's leaders and contenders used the electoral method to establish themselves is well told by Professor Tun-jen Cheng of the College of William and Mary and Ph.D. candidate Yung-ming Hsu of the University of Michigan. In “Issue Structure, the DPP's Factionalism, and Party Realignment,” they record how competition within the opposition movement in pre-DPP days continued after the party's formation in 1986. The founders of the DPP initially divided into two major factions, one stressing constitutional reform leading to democratization, the other emphasizing Taiwanese identity and advo cacy of Taiwan's independence from China. Supporters of these contrasting positions remained relatively stable in size and composition long enough to earn and maintain distinction, respectively, as the Formosa Faction and the New Tide (or New Wave) factions. The former usually won party leadership positions until about 1992. That year saw a reversal of fortune—the New Tide faction rode the crest of a successful campaign to repeal all party platform restrictions on advocating independence from the mainland, and gained most of the DPP's top leadership positions.
Cheng and Hsu demonstrate that the New Tide's strategy on the issue of a party call for Taiwan independence helped to demarcate the DPP from the KMT and also appealed to a substantial enough segment of the electorate to secure the DPP's position as the major opposition party. It was able to retain a share of important local magistrates and mayors' offices in 1993, and to continue to enjoy prominence in the Legislative Yuan in 1995. After the 1996 election, it had similar status in the National Assembly.
But the DPP's strategy of focusing on an independence plank in its platform had a built-in limitation: it depended for its success on voter preferences related to a single major theme. The party found that there was a ceiling on the number of voters who would respond to this plank alone. Thus, further success depended on finding other issues that might attract newcomers to the DPP. One of these, membership in the United Nations, was also taken up by the KMT, and therefore did not add much to the DPP's share of subsequent votes.
Another major political issue—corruption in government and business—emerged on Taiwan's political scene as a result of changing relations between the state and the economy. Political scientist Chyuan-Jeng Shiau of National Taiwan University, in “Elections and the Changing State-Business Relationship,” provides background for how that issue was taken up by the New Party (NP) and gave voters an alternative in the 1994, 1995, and 1996 elections.
The outcome of the March 1996 National Assembly vote confirms that the three parties—the KMT, the DPP, and the NP—are firmly established as competitors. In this election, the KMT attracted 50 percent of the vote, the DPP 30 percent, and the NP 15 percent. Whether this indicates the beginning of a long-term equilibrium remains to be seen.
One of the many insights in this book concerns the relationship between voter behavior and elite strategies. The 20th century has been dominated by economic interpretations of the political process. But it is as remiss to overlook the independent contribution of political leadership and strategy in shaping a country's fortunes as it is to ignore the impact of wealth on politics. Leadership skills and styles in turn are mediated by political institutions. In other words, leaders relate to followers, and rulers relate to those ruled, through formal and informal organizational practices and procedures. A number of these are described in “Elections and the Evolution of the Kuomintang,” by National Chengchi University political scientist Teh-fu Huang, and in “Local Factions and Elections in Taiwan's Democratization,” by National Taiwan University political scientist Ming-tong Chen.
Taiwan's unusual electoral system, so well analyzed in this book, continues to be one of the critical factors in shaping the distribution of power. Premier Lien Chan, now the vice president-elect, has proposed that the system be reappraised and that consideration be given to replacing multimember districts with exclusively single member constituencies. He has also recommended that a second ballot paper be provided on which voters can choose between alternative party lists for filling some, perhaps half, the seats of the Legislative Yuan and the National Assembly. This revision has received initially favorable responses from the opposition parties. It is similar to a revision recently adopted by Japan, where multimember seats were pioneered and from which the framers of the ROC constitution borrowed the idea. Discussion of this issue will be one of the major items on the agenda of the newly-elected National Assembly.
The National Assembly will also consider other proposed reforms that bear on the constitutional arrangements governing parties and elections. These include bringing Legislative Yuan terms of office into conformity with those of the president and the National Assembly (assuming the Assembly is not abolished, an issue that is high on the DPP's agenda) , and scheduling future elections simultaneously.
Such a change would incidentally reduce the number and frequency of voting days, greatly pleasing the overworked Central Election Commission and the many employers in Taiwan who complain about the frequency with which they have to give employees time off to vote. But the manifest purpose of the scheduling is to promote party government, which is likely to strengthen the powers of the presidency at the expense of the legislature. Why? If legislators run for office on the same day as the president, the greater visibility of the latter is likely to dwarf individual candidacies and encourage voters to cast ballots for nominees of the same party for both offices. If such coattail effects sweep partisans of the president into the legislature, the chief executive's influence presumably would be enhanced.
To secure legislative acceptance of this objective, however, a grand compromise is probably necessary, one in which the legislature finds its powers to counter balance the executive branch enhanced. One way to increase its leverage over the presidency is to require that ministerial or other appointments be approved by the legislature, rather than rely on interpellations alone to hold appointees responsible. (During interpellations, ministers appear in the legislature to answer questions from the floor.) A truly grand compromise would include abolition of the National Assembly and transfer of its power to amend the constitution to the Legislative Yuan.
The emergence of these major political issues has been facilitated by the rise of a multiparty government through elections. Concerns about party stability on the one hand, and aspirations to recast the relationship between the executive and legislative branches on the other, are at the heart of the next phase of Taiwan's democratic development. This stage would not be possible but for the realignment of parties that followed the 1992 Legislative Yuan elections and was reinforced in the 1993 mayoral and magisterial elections. The authors of these chapters cannot quite agree on what to call these two influential rounds of voting.
Hung-mao Tien abjures labeling either of them a so-called founding election (one that ushers in a genuine multiparty democracy), a phenomenon observed in the democratization of many other nations in the “Third Wave” of new democracies that swept the globe in the 1970s and 1980s. Political scientists Chu Yun-han of National Taiwan University and Tse-min Lin of the University of Texas, Austin, on the other hand, regard 1992 as the year not only of a founding election for Taiwan's new democracy, but as a critical election year in aligning voter preferences according to party.
Other scholars have emphasized, however, the importance of the 1991 National Assembly vote, which produced a substantial majority for the KMT in that constitution-amending venue. That election, which enabled the KMT to make significant constitutional changes, had quite different effects from one that would have required more interparty bargaining to guarantee passage of amendments—as the 1996 National Assembly election surely will. Such distinctions are not only important to scholars, they help everyone make more sense of Taiwan's democratic institutions.
Taiwan's political actors are now proceeding to the next stages of constitutional reform and of democratic development, including broadened popular participation in the shaping and sharing of all values—political, economic, social, and cultural. As they do so, elections can be expected to continue to play a major role in the consolidation of the first Chinese democracy.
Political scientist James A. Robinson, a long-time observer of Taiwan's elections and political development, is president emeritus and regents professor of the University of West Florida.