Taiwan Today

Any political reporter who left Taiwan in 1989 and returned today would no longer recog­nize the Legislative Yuan. Not only would most of the faces be new, but many of the legislative proceedings would be new as well. Most of all, the formerly quiet and predictable bill-passing sessions have been replaced by confrontational, some­times violent, debates.

But a writer covering the Legislative Yuan in 1994 would also find that behind the theatrics are ef­forts to shift proceedings toward more ra­tional and constructive sessions. One of the most important forces in this move­ment is the Legislature’s improved re­search capabilities.

In 1990, the Legislative Yuan began subsidizing each legislator for the sala­ries of two personal aides. In 1992, the subsidies were increased to cover four as­sistants; last year, the number was upped to six with each receiving a monthly salary of NT$40,000 (US$1,520). About one thousand subsidized aides now work for Taiwan’s 158 legisla­tors, and some law­makers have hired many more using their own funds. Legis­lator Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) of the Demo­cratic Progressive Party (DPP) is believed to have hired more than twenty aides. And all lawmakers have access to the fourteen researchers at the Leg­islative Research Service, opened in 1988.

How are these aides changing legis­lative proceedings? DPP Legislator Chang Chun-hsiung (張俊雄) says he has seen aides help the Legislature mature since he began his political career in 1984. “The DPP was relatively small then,” Chang says. “We didn’t have many resources, such as professional legal assistance. That’s why we used unconventional ways to attract attention to certain issues, and sometimes we couldn’t provide hard facts or statistics to support ourselves. Thanks to the increasing number of aides, we no longer have to do that.”

The DPP now has a strong network of researchers, he says. Chang has three full­-time aides who assist him in doing research and reviewing bills, drafting interpellations, preparing speeches, and briefing him before attending seminars. “I’m better prepared and therefore per­form better at the legislative meetings,” Chang says. “This goes for every DPP leg­islator. Our party can now provide solid information when debating an issue, in­stead of resorting to violence or making a scene.”

The growing network of aides has also helped develop ties between legisla­tors and their constituents. Kuomintang (KMT) Legislator Chu Fong-chi (朱鳳芝), now in the first year of her second term, says aides have greatly expanded a lawmaker’s job description. “Four or five
The growing network of aides has also helped develop ties between legisla­tors and their constituents. Kuomintang (KMT) Legislator Chu Fong-chi (朱鳳芝), now in the first year of her second term, says aides have greatly expanded a lawmaker’s job description. “Four or five years ago, constituents did not know what legislators could do for them,” she says. “Not much of the work had to do with directly serving voters. Today, the situation is totally different. Constituents know how to get things done through their leg­islators. They ask big and small favors, including things we can’t help with or that require a huge effort.” Chu estimates that her aides handled ten thousand requests from constituents during her first three years in office.

“Nowadays, if legislators want to do their job, they can’t do without aides,” Chu says. “It would be impossible to draft interpellations, attend the countless meet­ings, and still personally respond to voters’ requests.” Lin Kuo-chun (林國俊), one of Chu’s aides, started the job three years ago while studying for an MBA at Soochow University. His responsibilities have grown from reviewing budget bills to handling PR work. He now regularly visits the legislator’s district in Taoyuan to respond directly to voters’ requests, pay courtesy visits, and get feedback from constituents. Aides are “the hands and feet of a representative,” Lin says. “Leg­islators deal with tens of thousands of vot­ers and keep an eye on the Executive Yuan. They no longer can do without helping hands.”

In another effort to boost research resources, the Legislative Research Service (LRS) was formed in 1988. This team of fourteen researchers is open to the entire Legislature. LRS staff members write reports and research pa­pers on proposed bills as reference mate­rials for lawmakers. In their first five years, they published 260 papers. In addi­tion, the staff answers a steady stream of phone calls from legislators in a hurry to get facts and figures.

The service is nonpartisan, which political analysts view as helpful in smoothing legislative proceedings. “There are too many controversies in the current political environment,” says Tsao Chun-han (曹俊漢), a researcher at the In­stitute of European and American Stud­ies, Academia Sinica, and a professor of political science at National Taiwan Uni­versity. “Legislators need their personal staff, but they also need the LRS. These aides have some advantages, especially in reviewing legislative bills—they don’t have the partisan baggage and can be more objective.”

But Tsao thinks the current structure of the LRS is inadequate to handle all the responsibilities a legislative research agency should cover. He recommends a greatly expanded institution with a bigger staff and broader functions. The U.S. Congressional Research Service, for example, has a staff of more than 800, and coordinates regularly with other govern­ment offices and agencies.

Legislators identify other problems as well. The LRS was established to work on projects directly requested by the legislators. But during the last fiscal year, legislators requested a total of only twenty reports, using only about one-third of the research capability of the LRS. Why? The main reason is that, with the increasing number of personal aides subsidized for lawmakers, most prefer to work with their own staff researchers. The result was that LRS staffers ended up setting their own priorities on research for about two-thirds of their time. “In this sense, LRS is not functioning as expected,” says researcher Tsao Chun-han.

When not filling legislators’ re­quests, LRS aides choose which bills to re­search from among the thousands submitted. “We divide the bills among our staff according to their specialties and let them decide the priority,” explains Huang Yin-sen (黃英紳), LRS coordinator and budget section chief. When the re­ports and papers come out, the agency sends a copy to each legislator. But some legislators have questioned whether this is an efficient use of time and resources.

Carl Min Ku (顧敏), director of the Secretariat of the Legislature, points out that the service was not fully planned before it was established. “The service was set up for the sake of being set up,” he says. “There was hardly any discussion of its functions, the job positions, or its struc­ture. Only after it was established did peo­ple begin to plan how it would function. No wonder it’s not functioning well.”

But coordinator Huang maintains that lawmakers do use the information generated. “Legislators get lots of reports and papers from us, and I believe most of them read the information,” he says. He adds that some take advantage of the translation and fact-finding services, es­pecially to supplement the research of their personal staff members. KMT Legis­lator Chu Fong-chi, for example, says she uses the LRS regularly for these services. She cites recently using them for translat­ing Japanese documents on immigration law. “The aides are very professional,” she says.

Nevertheless, few lawmakers have used the aides to review a bill. Legislator Chang Chun-hsiung argues that the LRS is simply not appropriate for large-scale re­search projects. “Every legislator needs to show where he stands,” he says. “There­fore, he needs personal staff to review bills or to do research, in order to support his individual stance.” Chang expects his personal assistants to go beyond clipping newspaper articles and gathering govern­ment statistics. They often investigate an issue first-hand by interviewing experts and the people involved in a specific issue.

But Huang believes the hesitancy to use the LRS stems from a lack of priority given to research. Some legislators, he maintains, would still rather appeal to emotion than use solid information when arguing a case in the Legislature. “Most of them want media attention,” he says. “Because the services we provide are available to all, most legislators do not rely heavily on us. They want to find something no one else has. If they are really interested in a certain bill, they prefer letting their personal aides dig out something that can attract the spotlight. Many of them are searching for scandals.”

“Because the services we provide are available to all, most legislators do not rely heavily on us. They want to find something no one else has. If they are re­ally interested in a certain bill, they prefer letting their personal aides dig out some­thing that can attract the spotlight. Many of them are searching for scandals.”

Another problem is that some legis­lators complain that the LRS staff has too much interaction with the Executive Yuan. Since the Legislative Library is very limited, consisting mainly of infor­mation clipped from local newspapers, LRS researchers often use the facilities of the Executive Yuan. This is perceived as a conflict of interest.

A larger problem is also hindering efforts to define the role of the LRS, ac­cording to Huang. He says the service suf­fers because of current uncertainty over the lawmaking process—whether laws should originate in the Executive Yuan or in the Legislature. Currently, the system is closer to a presidential system, but there are calls to shift to a parliamentary one.

“The confusion over our national system makes it difficult for the LRS to work well,” Huang says. “If we adopt a parliamentary system, then all bills would be proposed by legislators. Because most legislators are in the ruling party, most will defend the bills—only opposition­ party legislators will try to find fault with them.” In such a scenario, research fund­ing would be better spent subsidizing an opposition research agency. The LRS would no longer be needed. “On the other hand, if we adopt the presidential system, the LRS will be needed. No legislators, ei­ther KMT or DPP, would be involved in drafting bills, but they would be responsi­ble for reviewing them to check and bal­ance the executive branch.”

Efforts to better define and refine the role of legislative aides are already under way, both for per­sonal and LRS researchers. Last summer, a group of nine legislative aides spent three weeks visiting U.S. govern­ment agencies, in a program sponsored by the U.S. Information Agency and the Ei­senhower World Affairs Institute. Partici­pant Chen Chien-chung (陳建仲), an assistant to DPP legislator Hsieh Chang­ting (謝長廷), says the biggest difference he found between the ROC and U.S. leg­islative aides system was the division of labor. “U.S. legislative aides don’t do re­ search—they focus on administrative work,” he says. “Legislators get the in­formation they need from the Congres­sional Research Service, the General Accounting Office, the Congressional Budget Office, the Office of Technology Assessment, and others.” To improve in­ formation channels, he advocates expanding the LRS and also building up private think tanks through government assistance.

But at present, high turnover is the biggest difficulty among both the per­sonal legislative aides and LRS staff. When the LRS was formed, fourteen researchers and three assistants were hired. The re­searchers were well qualified; all had passed a difficult civil servant’s examina­tion and all held M.A. or Ph.D. degrees. But by the end of the first year, thirteen of the original fourteen had quit. Several were shifted to the legislative committees, some were hired by other government agencies, and some switched to the pri­vate sector. Only coordinator Huang Yin­-sen stayed.

Why such a high turnover? “Because there’s no money and no recognition,” Huang answers frankly. The service has hired a second group of fourteen research­ers. All hold at least a bachelor’s degree and 60 percent have an M.A. But although the job is, in effect, to be consultants and advisers to the legislators, Huang says re­searchers receive little respect. Huang, 46, holds a master’s degree in accounting and auditing. He came to the service from the Ministry of Audit at the Control Yuan and was shocked at the lack of benefits given to aides. The job title—legislative aide­—does not command much respect, he says. “The fact that we don’t even get a parking space inside the compound makes it apparent that this job has a low status.”

The legislators’ personal aides often make even less money and face greater stress. “Lots of people leave the job in the first three months because they can’t take the pressure or can’t get along with the boss,” says legislative assistant Lin Kuo-chun. In a 1993 survey he con­ducted on legislative aides, Lin found that 68 percent are between 25 and 34, and most are well-educated—80 percent had at least a bachelor’s degree, 20 per­cent held a master’s. More than half re­ported working longer than an eight-hour day, and some aides were previously paid less than the NT$40,000 per month subsidized by the central government. The salary was originally deposited into each legislator’s account, and lawmakers sometimes offered younger or inexperi­enced aides less money—take it or leave it. In other cases, legislators hired fewer than the six aides subsidized by the gov­ernment in order to use the money for other purposes. To stop the misuse of these funds, as of 1993, the salaries were deposited directly into the assistants’ accounts.

Another hardship is that the job car­ries few fringe benefits. Not until 1992 could assistants receive the basic bene­fits of a year-end bonus (nearly all em­ployees receive at least an extra six-weeks’ pay at Chinese New Year) and the government’s general labor in­surance. Perhaps worst of all, the posi­tion offers no job security. “Of course, the turnover is high after elections,” Lin says. “You lose your job if your boss loses the election.”

As a first step toward improving job conditions and retaining aides, Li Hsin (李新), an assistant to Chinese New Party Legislator Yok Mu-ming (郁慕明), founded a Congressional Aides Union last May. Li stresses that creating long­-term positions for aides will help the whole Legislature. “The newly elected legislators need help even in finding the conference rooms and using the facili­ties,” he says. “What are they going to do if their aides are as new as they are? Experienced aides understand the operation of the Legislature and can help legisla­tors settle in. They know how to compro­mise and get things done in the meetings. Because of this, there weren’t as many violent confrontations during this session as before.”

By contrast, the Executive Yuan of­fers secure governmental positions unaf­fected by the election process, and it has built up strong research channels. Many legislators believe the Legislative Yuan should do the same in order to better check and balance the power of the Ex­ecutive Yuan. “Because the elections leave many legislators coming and going, it is difficult for them to accumulate expe­rience,” Li says. “Therefore, the support staff should shoulder the responsibility.” He hopes to keep aides in the system in some capacity even if their legislator is not re-elected. Says Li, “We should em­phasize their professionalism rather than their loyalty to one legislator.”

Wu Ching-chuan (吳靜娟), one of the aides working for Chang Chun-hsiung, has a similar viewpoint. “I always have the feeling that we work for a branch of­fice, but that we never become part of the head office,” she says. “We need a position in the Legislature. Then we would stay and become experienced, and Legis­lative operations would improve and run more smoothly.”