​I've been going through some of the 2016 Taiwan elections data for another project, and I came across something that I haven't seen noted elsewhere. In the presidential vote, Tsai Ing-wen actually improved her vote shares more in the north than elsewhere in Taiwan.

Nationally, she won 45.63% of the total vote in 2012, and 56.12% in 2016, for a net aggregate swing of 10.49%. But this increase wasn't uniform across Taiwan. Her worst performance relative to 2012 was in Penghu, where her vote share increased from 45.65% to 50.81%, for a net swing of only 5.16%. Her best was in Taipei, where she increased her vote share from 39.54% to 51.96%, for a net swing of 12.41%, which gave her an absolute majority of the vote. Again, that was in Taipei, which was supposed to be the bluest stronghold of them all, and the most resistant to the appeal of the DPP ticket! (Or at least that's what this idiot thought.) 

Moreover, Taipei wasn't an outlier. From Keelung all the way through Miaoli, Tsai's vote share increased more in every single northern jurisdiction than it did nationally, as the table below shows. By contrast, the swing toward Tsai was lowest in the south and east/island jurisdictions. And central Taiwan, where I thought the swing would be largest, was actually slightly behind the national average. (Perhaps that's one of the reasons several endangered KMT incumbent legislators in Taichung and Nantou held on to win re-election. More on that in another post.)

This result is surprising in part because it's the opposite of what happened in 2012, when the national swing toward Tsai was 4.24%. In that election, Tsai's gain was lowest in Taipei at 2.58%, and highest in Pingtung at 4.88%. In other words, in 2016 Tsai improved the most in precisely the places where she improved the least in 2012. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Taipei itself: a DPP majority there was hard to imagine as recently as two years ago.

​The North Is No Longer Blue
​Tsai's wins in the north are also surprising because the conventional wisdom has long held that Taiwan has a strong regional divide, with a deep blue north, deep green south, and swing districts in the middle. This is obviously a simplification, but it's so widely accepted among the political commentariat in Taiwan that there's even a wikipedia entry in Chinese for the phrase, "blue north, green south" (beilan, nanlü 北藍南綠).

The accepted explanation for these regional political differences is that they reflect socioeconomic and sub-ethnic ones: there are more waishengren in the north and east, aborigines in the east and central highlands, and a concentration of Hakka voters in Miaoli and Hsinchu Counties who have tended to support pan-blue candidates, while the Hoklo benshengren heartland of Tainan has been the DPP's strongest area.

​But some research has found region to be a significant independent predictor of vote choice even accounting for partisanship, national identity, age, occupation, attitudes toward cross-Strait relations, and so forth. Why would this be? Part is probably a "local hero" effect--national candidates do better than average in their hometowns because of their long-standing personal connections there that trump partisan affinities. Part is certainly a factional story: when local factions switch sides they can bring a big chunk of votes with them all the way up to the presidential level. But while these effects certainly have existed in local and legislative elections for a long time, it's not obvious that they consistently matter in presidential ones.
​ 
Does Political Geography Still Matter in Taiwan?
The way that Tsai won in 2016 leads me to think we should reconsider how, or even whether, geography has an independent effect in presidential elections. It's not self-evident that presidential vote choice in 2016 had anything to do with where voters lived, once we take into account all the usual demographic variables. There was no pan-blue firewall north of the Choshui River, and the DPP's win was clearly not built on turning out more core supporters in pan-green strongholds in the south. Instead, the swing data suggest a shift in the same groups of voters toward Tsai and away from the KMT all over the island. (Voting for the legislature is a different matter--I'll tackle that in a separate post.)

Granted, the swing toward Tsai was not as uniform as in 2012, when it ranged between only 2.58 and 4.88%. But still, in every single locality Tsai won at least 5% more in 2016 than she did four years ago. That suggests, for at least the last two elections, voters who switched their votes to Tsai did so because of factors not correlated with where they lived.

The best illustration of the irrelevance of geography to vote choice is what happened in New Taipei, where Eric Chu was, and still is, the mayor. He was re-elected there in 2014, holding on during a green wave that flipped most of the other local executives to the DPP. If a candidate's local connections matter at all, then Chu probably should have been able to deliver a hometown bump. Yet a little over a year later he won only 1/3 of the vote in New Taipei, winning 250,000 votes less than he did in the mayor's race, a lower share than the 37.5% he got in Taipei City proper and only 2 points above his island-wide total. And as the figures above show, Tsai Ing-wen improved more in New Taipei than she did nationally--not the result we'd expect if Chu was enjoying some kind of home-court advantage.     

​Now THIS is What a Party Stronghold Looks Like
Finally, consider the comparative angle. There's a country not far away that demonstrates exceptionally strong regional effects on voting behavior: South Korea. In the last presidential election there (in 2012), the opposition candidate Moon Jae-in won at least 85% of the vote in the three provinces that make up the southwest region of Jeolla, while the incumbent party candidate Park Geun-hye won over 80% in two provinces in the southeast region of Gyeongsang. That is a stark regional divide that has been present since the beginning of the democratic era in Korea. By this standard, Taiwan doesn't look very divided by geography at all. 

Does Where You Live Affect Who You Support for President?
In fact, it's worth considering whether the "blue north, green south" trope has outlived its usefulness as a guide to voting behavior in Taiwan. The Taiwanese media often writes election narratives that emphasize geography as the key to understanding voting patterns in presidential elections, with frequent discussion of "battleground regions" and "swing districts." And political scientists, too, routinely use the language of electoral geography to talk about presidential campaigns. (I'm guilty of this too. For other instances, see here, here, and for a kick, this wikileaks cable from AIT.)

But if you think about this a bit, it's an odd way to characterize voting for a single national office. Taiwan doesn't have an electoral college, so an extra vote for Tsai in Penghu is worth the same as one in Taipei, or Taichung, or Hualien, or anywhere else in Taiwan. When we talk about "swing regions" we are implicitly underemphasizing factors that don't vary much by location and playing up ones that do, like factional ties. And I'm starting to think those other, non-geographic factors are where the real story is at, particularly differences between age cohorts. Something to keep in mind as we pour over the post-election survey data. 

​Tsai Ing-wen and the DPP are headed for a historic victory in Saturday’s elections, and the battle has already begun to define the narrative about what that means. One fairly common refrain is that this likely outcome will presage a fundamental realignment of the party system around issues beyond the blue-green divide over cross-Strait relations.
 
I’m skeptical that we are about to see this kind of realigning election, despite the attention given to the campaigns of the so-called “Third Force” parties. I’m also skeptical that this result will be the death knell for the KMT as a political party capable of winning elections. The KMT's coming defeat clearly reflects deep unhappiness with Ma Ying-jeou and the KMT’s rule over the last eight years, intensified by a spectacularly ill-timed economic downturn over the last few months (at least if you are a KMT member!) But an unpopular leader, toxic party brand, and disillusioned supporters are not fatal to major party survival, as the DPP showed after its 2008 electoral thrashing. So while a KMT recovery is not assured, and will at a minimum require some major leadership shakeups, we shouldn't expect the party simply to fade away, and for all those pan-blue supporters (still at least 30 percent of the electorate) to suddenly become fans of the DPP or one of the new parties.

Of course, I could be totally wrong--I'm just some guy on the internet, after all. But either way, we'll know a lot more soon: elections have a nice way of splashing everybody with a cold dose of reality. The results of the election this Saturday will give us the most concrete evidence we'll have to evaluate these competing narratives. So, in the interest of intellectual honesty, let me lay out my own expectations about what will happen, and what it means. Beyond who wins and loses, here's what I'll be watching most closely to see where Taiwanese politics is headed.

In my previous post, I argued that the DPP's vote share in the legislative district races was likely to track Tsai Ing-wen's vote share fairly closely. From that basic intuition, I came up with a rank list of seats indicating how many districts the DPP would win with a given vote share for Tsai. That forecast rested on several assumptions:

1. There wouldn't be a very large incumbent advantage for KMT legislators;
2. Tsai's increase in vote share over 2012 would be uniform across districts;
3. The electorate voting for president would look essentially the same as that voting for the legislature.

I spent much of the last post defending assumption 1. Here I want to relax assumption 2, that Tsai's vote share is going to increase uniformly across all districts. That's certainly not going to be true in a technical sense, but to what degree will it be violated? The conventional wisdom about Taiwan's electoral geography is that the the north is more solidly blue than other parts of Taiwan, so the KMT's vote share will decline less in Taipei than in, say, Tainan or Pingtung. But how much less is hard to predict.

Let me put the punch line up front: I don't think Tsai's increase in vote share is going to vary much by locality. Evidence follows after the jump.

This is fun: we have an argument! I made some assertions and predictions in a post on the upcoming LY election, and Nathan Batto of the Frozen Garlic blog has taken me to task a bit.
 
So what's my response? Well, let me begin by agreeing with Nathan: I AM completely wrong about one big thing. I made an elementary error when I calculated the effects of a swing toward Tsai and away from the pan-blue camp: I forgot to divide by two. As a consequence, my forecast violated what I will now forever remember as the First Law of Swing: if one party goes up, some other party must come down (click that link, BTW, it's good stuff.) In hindsight, a really silly mistake. This pretty much sums up my position: ​

Nevertheless, simple mistake, simple fix. Divide by two, dummy. Below is the same ranking of LY seats, with an extra column added that gives the size of the swing needed to flip the district to the other camp (swing toward Tsai from 2012 is positive, swing away is negative).

(Updated data file is below. I've corrected a few errors in the previous file; they're listed in the documentation sheet. Most changes were small enough to be inconsequential, but Nathan pointed out a significant one: Tsai's Hualien vote in 2012 was 25.9, not 29.9. Thanks for catching that.)

Forecast, Take Two
With that mea culpa out of the way, I still think the basic approach here is sound, assuming one does the math right: go down the swing column, take a guess what you think Tsai will get above her 2012 vote share, and that’ll tell you roughly which districts she’ll carry. (Note that by "carry," I mean she'll win a majority over the combined Chu-Soong vote, not just a plurality over Chu.) And if Tsai carries a district, it’s going to be tough for the KMT candidate to hold it.

So, again assuming Taitung reverts to its natural blueness:

• the magic seat number for a DPP is still #41,
• that's still New Taipei 10.

For Tsai to carry that district, she'd need an increase in her vote share of 5.23% above 2012, or 45.63+5.23 = 50.86% of the total presidential vote.
 
Nathan argues that we should give KMT incumbents at least an extra two points cushion on average (see discussion below). So let's be conservative, do that for all KMT candidates (most of the seats the DPP would have to win are being defended by incumbents anyway), and round up. That means if Tsai wins at least 53% of the presidential vote, then the DPP is likely to have a majority in the LY. She’s currently polling well above 53%, so the DPP is a strong favorite to win a single-party majority. 

Thus, I'm actually coming down very close to Nathan's forecast that a Tsai share of the vote somewhere between 53-54% is sufficient to get the DPP to a majority.

I also agree that once Tsai gets much higher than that, the legislative election has the potential to turn into a slaughter. A uniform (big assumption!) 12 point swing toward Tsai (45.63-->57.63%) means she would carry every district all the way down to Hsinchu City, ranked #56 on the list. That would leave the KMT with at most about 17 district seats, which starts to look like the DPP's situation after 2008. (Unlike the DPP, the KMT is cushioned a bit by an advantage in the aborigine seats. But only a bit.)

So, basically, we're in agreement. But that's boring, so let's see if I can find something else to argue with Nathan about.

 Assumptions about 2016: Room for an Argument?
​As Nathan noted, debates are good because they force us to clarify our assumptions and claims and double-check our data. So in that spirit, let me list the key assumptions this forecast rests on (later I'll explore what happens when we relax a couple of these, so don't bug out yet!). They are:

• A1. DPP LY candidates will run close to Tsai in 2016; that is, every DPP candidate's vote share will be approximately the same as Tsai's LY district vote share.
• A2. The percent change in Tsai's vote from 2012 will be uniform across all LY districts.
• A3. The electorate in the presidential election in each district is the same as in the legislative election.* 
• A4. The DPP will win 16 non-SMD seats: 16 PR seats and no aborigine seats.

I'll tackle A1 now, and address the rest in separate posts. (Otherwise this post will be book-length by the time I'm done. And the election might already be over!)

A1: Will DPP LY candidates run close to Tsai in 2016?
This assumption can be challenged on at least two fronts: (1) incumbency advantage, and (2) the behavior of disaffected pan-blue voters. Nathan devoted a lot of space to (1), so I'll start with a consideration of that. Here's what I find when I run the numbers again: 

• "Incumbency advantage" in Taiwan does exist. Incumbents do better all else equal. Whether that's because they have the resources of office to draw on in elections, or they're better types, we can't say from just these data. It's probably a bit of both. But if you're trying to hold on to a seat, it's better to have the incumbent in the race than the challenger. So I agree with Nathan here.
• Once we look only at DPP-KMT head-to-head races: KMT incumbents ran ahead of Ma Ying-jeou on average in 2012 by about 1.4 points. And DPP incumbents actually ran further ahead of Tsai (+3.5 vs +1.4; Nathan's numbers are +4.5 to +2.2). So incumbents in both parties did systematically better than non-incumbents. I agree with Nathan here, too.
• But the big picture remains the same: relative to the potential swing we're talking about, any advantage the KMT will get from having incumbents running will be small. If Tsai is winning even 55% of the vote, a lot of KMT incumbents are toast even if their DPP opponents are running a couple points behind her. (I think Nathan agrees with this too.)

Now, the data. I initially claimed based on the full set of 73 districts that there wasn't evidence of a KMT "incumbent advantage" in 2012. That is, that KMT LY candidates didn't run significantly ahead of Ma Ying-jeou. Nathan argued quite sensibly that we should look only at those races where the KMT and DPP candidates together got almost all the vote. The question then is, what is "almost all"? Nathan went with 95% of the total vote. I initially went with no single 3rd party candidate winning >5% of the vote, which accounts for some of the discrepancy between us.

I've replicated his analysis with my data, and come up with similar numbers to his, although I find a weaker KMT incumbency advantage than he does (1.4 vs. 2.2 points ahead). The remaining discrepancy appears to be in our coding of incumbents in the head-to-head cases: I have 32 in the KMT, and 12 in the DPP, to 30 and 10 for Nathan. (I pulled my coding from the CEC website, which records party list legislators running in districts as incumbents, and I may have missed a couple of these. So I'd trust Nathan's incumbency coding over mine.) The signs remain the same, though, and so does the conclusion: incumbency provides an electoral benefit​, albeit a small one.

Instead of a crappy image of a simple table (dammit, Weebly), I find it more helpful to see a visual representation of what we're talking about. Below I've plotted the 2012 LY vote data against the presidential vote, distinguishing between incumbents (solid) and non-incumbents (hollow). The red line is just the function y=x; that is, dots above this line represent candidates who ran ahead of the presidential ticket, and dots below represent those who ran behind.

Here's the DPP:

This is a really good fit. The correlation between Tsai and the LY candidates vote share is about 0.826, and there's only one obvious outlier. (That's Kaohsiung 9, where Chen Chih-chung split the DPP vote.) Note also that even just at a glance, DPP incumbents appear to be doing significantly better than challengers: if we ignore Kaohsiung 9, all but about three are at or above the line, which means they got as many votes as Tsai did.*

Now let's look at the KMT:

The fit is...less good. (r=.377). There are a lot more outliers, especially in deep blue areas where Ma got a lot of the vote. If we want to evaluate whether there's an incumbent advantage on the KMT side as well, we need to account for this. Hence the decision to drop the 25 cases where there was a significant 3rd-party vote. 

Here's what the picture looks like with just the 48 districts where KMT+DPP LY vote > 95%: 

Ah, much better. Now the KMT looks a lot more like the DPP picture, and the correlation is about the same (r=.835 vs 0.860 for the DPP). I count 9 incumbents who clearly ran behind Ma, but at least 21 who ran ahead. Three of those even ran way ahead in tough districts where Ma got less than 42% of the vote. This is a demonstration that there's a KMT incumbency advantage, right? And isn't it therefore at least plausible that some KMT incumbents could survive a Tsai wave because of this, even if their districts turn green?

Well, yes, if you define this advantage as running significantly ahead of the KMT presidential standard-bearer, Ma. But this is not actually what matters for winning reelection. What the forecast above relies on is the Tsai vote in each district, which is the complement of not just the Ma vote but of Ma+Soong. In other words, I assumed that everyone voting for Soong would also vote for the KMT LY candidate in the district (in the head-to-head contests, I don't this this is crazy). If we add in Soong's 2.77%, then here's roughly what the picture looks like (Soong's 2012 vote varied a lot across districts, too, so this is a simplification):     

A bit less impressive: there are only six incumbents (of 32) who ran significantly ahead of the combined pan-blue presidential vote, and therefore would have won in districts where Tsai also won. There's just not a lot here from 2012 to indicate that the 40 KMT incumbents running in 2016, taken as a whole, have good odds of surviving if Tsai wins their districts, no matter how great their constituency service is. If it's like 2012, then we can expect about 20%, or eight, to run significantly ahead of the pan-blue presidential vote.

This is the main point that I tried--clumsily--to communicate in my previous post. Going into this analysis, I had a vague expectation that the KMT majority included quite a few districts that Tsai won in 2012 (that is, where LY vote of KMT > Ma + Soong), suggesting at least a plausible path to survival in this environment. (This stemmed from my own ignorance about 2012, not anything Nathan has written.) That's simply not the case, and unless 2016 is significantly different than 2012, this bodes very poorly for the survival of KMT legislators in districts on the 25-45 range on that list above.

Is 2016 going to be like 2012?
That leads me to the second issue: is 2016 going to be like 2012? Nathan argues that it won't be: the last election was a nearly perfect blue-green head-to-head fight, whereas 2016 will have a lot of disaffected pan-blue voters searching around for alternatives. And some of them will back Tsai, then turn around and vote for pan-blue LY candidates.  

Before I make my case for why I don't think this will be a large share of voters, a clarification: my goal here is to establish a baseline expectation for what district vote share DPP candidates will win with a given Tsai presidential vote share. So I'm focusing exclusively on the DPP side of the races. The mess of coordination failures on the pan-blue side is probably going to make this a conservative estimate, but again, I think it's useful to establish a generic partisan baseline first, before we start adjusting up or down, and it's much simpler to do that by starting with the DPP. 

Now, to the question about 2016. I expect Tsai's vote share and DPP LY vote shares will again be highly correlated in 2016. We know there are going to be a lot more Tsai supporters in 2016: some will be former or disaffected pan-blue voters, some will be independents, and some will be newly minted voters. Let's rank-order how likely green-blue split-ticket voting should be given the origin of these groups of Tsai voters:

1. Disaffected pan-blue voters.
2. Independents.
3. New voters (i.e. young people aged<24).

​Disaffected pan-blue voters are the most likely to cross over and vote for Tsai, then support their local pan-blue candidate in the LY race. (I'm going to leave aside the other two for the moment--I don't think either of these groups will do much ticket-splitting in the aggregate.) There are potentially a lot of blue-leaning Tsai voters. If most split their votes then DPP candidates are, indeed, going to run significantly behind Tsai in most districts, and she'll need a larger margin of victory to guarantee a DPP LY majority. But let me suggest three reasons why split-ticket voting may not be all that frequent even among this disaffected pan-blue population in the coming election. 

First is the shifting partisan identification of the electorate. Nathan wrote a very nice piece for the China Policy Institute blog about the shift in the number of pan-green vs pan-blue partisans over the last couple of years. (If you haven't read it yet, go do it--it's well worth your time.) The takeaway from that piece is that there are a lot fewer pan-blue identifiers now, and a lot more pan-green, than in 2012. How much? Well, instead of a 50-45 advantage in favor of the pan-blue, it's looking more and more from public opinion research like the ratio has flipped toward a green plurality. If we think about 2016 in this light, Tsai's increase in the polls is not entirely a protest vote against Ma and the KMT, but also reflects an increase in identification with the pan-green side of the political spectrum. It's difficult to estimate the size of that increase, but to the extent it's real it should help not just Tsai but DPP LY candidates, too.

Second is turnout. In the current environment, there are a lot of disgruntled pan-blue voters. They're presented with two presidential candidates, Chu and Soong, who aren't eliciting a lot of enthusiasm at this point. In addition, there's the little matter of how Chu ended up heading the KMT ticket: he arranged to have the previous nominee Hung Hsiu-chu dumped, and that angered her supporters within the party. It's not hard to imagine a significant chunk of the pan-blue side simply sitting this election out rather than casting a protest vote for Soong or Tsai. (There's also the matter of travel back from the PRC mainland to vote--it's costly for Taiwanese based there to do this, and the lack of a competitive race for president probably means many more of them will stay away.) If they do that, then those votes won't be there in the LY races either. 

Third is that the presidential and LY elections will be concurrent in 2016.  2012 was the first time that voters could cast a ballot for president and the legislature at the same time. Prior to that year, these elections were always held on different days, and often different years, which led to a significantly different electorate across these two types of races. In particular, presidential elections tended to have the highest turnout, with LY turnout 15-20% lower. I suspect, although I don't have the evidence at hand, that the KMT benefited the most from this lower turnout, because its resource advantages allowed it to push core supporters to the polls better than other parties. It's the kind of "hidden benefit" that can increase the size of the incumbency advantage and help sustain an LY majority for a long time even as the underlying nature of the electorate changes. But if the elections are held at the same time, this gap goes away. Just about everyone who shows up to vote in one election also votes in the other (unless they're deliberately boycotting something--see, e.g., the 2004 referendums). It's effectively the same electorate in both races.*

So while 2012 was a nearly perfect blue-green head-to-head contest, it's worth considering also the possibility that the close correlation between the presidential and LY elections that year was not exceptional, but more like a new norm. Like 2012, just about everyone who votes for president in 2016 will also vote for the LY. That means the fluctuation in turnout that we're used to seeing between presidential and LY elections will probably not be as stark going forward, and the likelihood that the presidency and LY will be controlled by different camps, as was true during the Chen Shui-bian era, will be lower from now on. (Note: I haven't looked much at the evidence here, and I'd be very interested to hear Nathan's and others' reactions to this speculation.)

For all these reasons, then, I think assuming a close correlation between Tsai's district vote share and the DPP candidate's in 2016 is a good way to start estimating how the legislative election will play out.

In future posts, I'll say something about the assumptions of a uniform swing, the complicating factor of separate yuanzhumin districts, and the PR seats. 

* I'm ignoring the fact that yuanzhumin (aborigine) voters don't vote in the same LY districts. In most cases this impact is minor, but in a couple districts they are 30% or more of the electorate. Since yuanzhumin voters have been to this point overwhelmingly pan-blue, this introduces a pan-blue bias into the forecast: I'm assuming those votes will be there in the LY races, which makes districts like Taitung or Hualien look a lot more blue than they really are. More on this in another post.

On March 9, the Taiwan Democracy Project hosted Lu-huei Chen, research professor and former director of the Election Study Center at National Chengchi University, Taipei. His talk was entitled "Electoral Politics and Cross-Strait Relations." The official event page is here.

Professor Chen is Distinguished Research Fellow at the Election Study Center and Professor of Political Science at National Chengchi University in Taiwan.  He is currently a visiting scholar of Top University Strategic Alliance (TUSA) at MIT. Professor Chen received his Ph. D. in political science from Michigan State University. His research focuses on political behavior, political socialization, research methods, and cross-Strait relations.  He has published articles in Issues and Studies, Journal of Electoral Studies (in Chinese), Social Science Quarterly, and Taiwan Political Science Review (in Chinese). He is the editor of Continuity and Change in Taiwan's 2012 Presidential and Legislative Election (in Chinese, 2013), Public Opinion Polls (in Chinese, 2013), and co-edited The 2008 Presidential Election: A Critical Election on Second Turnover (in Chinese, with Chi Huang and Ching-hsin Yu, 2009).

The local elections on November 29th in Taiwan were a resounding defeat for the ruling KMT, and a major victory for the DPP. Taiwan’s main opposition party captured seven county and city executives from the KMT, raising their total from 6 to 13 of Taiwan’s local jurisdictions. DPP mayors now lead four of Taiwan’s six special municipalities: Taoyuan, Taichung, Tainan, and Kaohsiung. In addition, the nominally independent Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) received tacit DPP support for his successful bid for Taipei mayor, booting the KMT out of the mayor’s office there for the first time in 16 years. Only in New Taipei did the KMT manage to hang on, thanks in part to the personal popularity of the incumbent mayor Eric Chu (朱立倫).

Equally striking was the swing away from the KMT at lower levels, where the party’s candidates have traditionally been more insulated from national trends: the number of KMT councilors dropped from 419 to 386 (out of 907), and KMT township heads fell from 121 to 80 (out of 204).  The KMT now holds a majority on only 6 of 23 city and county councils—remarkable for a party that could once count on control of the vast majority of local offices to help it mobilize votes for national elections.  The consistent swing away from the KMT across every jurisdiction in Taiwan suggests that this was a “wave” election—unhappiness with the ruling party and its chairman, President Ma Ying-jeou, drove a national slump in KMT support that showed up in vote totals nearly everywhere. Indeed, this was arguably the KMT’s worst-ever performance in a local election: only 1997 comes close, and the fact that all local offices were on the ballot this year, including the special municipalities, makes this a more consequential defeat than that election. (These figures are drawn from a presentation I gave at a Stanford roundtable on December 2; the slides from that talk are available here.)

It’s a little late for me to weigh in on the debate over why the KMT fared so badly—plenty of other people have done that already, and the impact is rapidly fading into the past as Taiwanese politics churns along. Instead, in this post I want to look forward and ask: what does the 2014 election tell us about future election outcomes in Taiwan, especially the 2016 presidential race?  

2014 Is Not 2016
The unquestioned assumption in most commentary in Taiwan is that the KMT’s recent electoral rout bodes poorly for its chances in the coming presidential and legislative elections, now tentatively set for January 2016. Some commentators have argued that the 2014 result indicates a fundamental electoral “breakthrough” for the DPP, rather than a temporary shift away from the KMT due to recent scandals and the unpopularity of President Ma, and that the DPP should be the favorite going into 2016.

This is not self-evident. To see why, we need only look at the last time around. In the last local elections in 2009-10, the DPP’s candidates for county and city executives actually won more total votes than did the KMT: 5,755,287 to 5,463,570. That turned out not to presage a DPP victory in the presidential race in 2012: Tsai Ying-wen lost to Ma Ying-jeou 51.6% to 45.6%.

Why the big difference? One reason is simply that they were held at different times: Taiwan was in a major recession (as was much of the world) in 2009-10, whereas by 2012 economic growth had bounced back. Another is that the relative importance of factors affecting mass voting behavior in local elections is different from national ones: ideological positioning and the state of the national economy, among other things, are likely to play a stronger role in vote choice in 2016 than they did in the local elections. The personal qualities of the candidates matter, too, and there’s always the possibility of a third candidate emerging as a serious contender, as happened in the 2000 presidential election.

So, until we know who the candidates are, what platforms they'll run on, and how the economy is likely to be doing, we should be cautious about forecasting a win for either major party. Nevertheless, might the 2014 elections at least tell us something meaningful about the relative appeal of the DPP and KMT right now? If we assume all the other factors will cancel each other out, doesn't the last election tell us the DPP will enjoy a generic partisan advantage going into 2016?

Not necessarily, and the reason is turnout. In general, it's 10-15 percent higher in presidential elections than local ones. If these extra voters who show up at the polls in presidential elections disproportionately support the KMT, then the local results are going to give an underestimate of the KMT’s expected vote share in 2016. So it would be nice to know how much of the DPP's success is due to KMT-leaning voters staying home, versus the DPP winning more votes. To figure that out, we need to dig into the raw vote totals a little more.

Was the DPP's Win a Result of Blue Voters Staying Home?
Let’s start with the basic numbers. Here are the turnout figures for 2012 and 2014:

• 2012: 13,452,016 votes cast, or 74.4 percent of all eligible voters;
• 2014: 12,512,135, or 67.6 percent.

So if turnout is on par with the last presidential election, there will be roughly a million more voters in 2016 than there were in 2014. If those voters look just like the 2014 electorate, then the local election offers a good estimate for 2016. But the more the non-voters in 2014 differ from the voters, the more we need to account for these differences to get an unbiased estimate.

Now, how about the partisan breakdown? Here's the vote totals for each party in 2012 (presidential election) and 2014 (county/city executives):

• 2012: Tsai Ying-wen (DPP): 6,093,578
• 2012: Ma Ying-jeou (KMT): 6,891,139
• 2014: DPP candidates: 6,684,089*
• 2014: KMT candidates: 4,990,667
  

(*I'm counting Ko Wen-je in Taipei as a DPP candidate here; more on that in a moment.)

Notably, the DPP candidates (including Ko Wen-je) together polled almost 600,000 votes more than Tsai did in the 2012 presidential race, even as turnout declined! So while the KMT had a disastrous drop from 2012 to 2014, there was also a significant increase in support for the DPP in 2014 above and beyond its support in the presidential election. Clearly, this is not just a story about asymmetric turnout of each party's base supporters, with pan-Blue voters sitting this one out. Instead, the DPP appears to have made big absolute gains as well: the party's vote total in 2014 was only about 200,000 short of what Ma Ying-jeou won in 2012, in a higher-turnout election. 

(For those interested in digging further into the numbers, I've put all these data in an Excel file, which can be accessed below):

The attempt by the KMT leadership to remove Wang Jin-pyng as speaker of the Legislative Yuan has a lot of interesting elements to it.  For electoral studies geeks, though, the most fascinating might be that Wang was elected on the KMT’s proportional representation or "at-large" list (不分區) rather than from a single-member district (單一選區).  As a consequence, he is especially vulnerable to purge attempts: unlike district legislators, Wang depends on his party’s support to retain his seat for this term.  

A little background first: since 1995, Taiwan has had a mixed-member electoral system (混合制) with two parallel electoral tiers.  Up until 2004, the larger, district-level tier consisted of between 25-30 multi-member districts (複數區), with multiple representatives elected from each district using the single non-transferable vote (SNTV) (不可轉移單票制).  The smaller, national-level tier consisted of a single nation-wide district in which seats were awarded to parties using closed-list proportional representation (CL-PR), based on the percentage of the vote that each party's district candidates won aggregated across all districts.  A major reform* before the 2008 election halved the size of the legislature, replaced the multi-member districts with single-member ones, and introduced a separate vote for the PR tier, but retained the closed-list rule for the PR seats.  

Winning the List

The "closed" part of "closed list" PR means that the party, not voters, controls who gets these seats.  It does so by submitting a ranked list of names (分配當選名單) prior to the election; when the seat totals for each party are announced, the PR seats are distributed down the list until the party's quota is met.  For instance, in the 2012 legislative election, the KMT won 16 seats in the PR tier, so the top 16 candidates on its party list were awarded seats.  This is how Wang Jin-pyng was most recently elected: he was ranked first on the list.  (You can find the lists for this and other elections at the Central Election Commission website.  The image at right was pulled from here.)   

It is not hard to see that the order of names on the party list goes a long way toward determining who gets seats.  The first candidate on the list is as good-as-elected once the list is submitted, unless the party fails to win any PR seats.  But the 16th candidate will have to sweat out the election.  And the 34th candidate has no realistic hope of winning a seat whatsoever.  Thus, whoever controls the party list controls the electoral fates of all the PR legislators.  Typically, party leaders determine the ranking and put themselves and their allies** at the top of the list, while incumbents who've ticked off the party leadership get left off entirely.  So legislators elected from the PR tier have to toe the party line if they want to remain in office.  

But that's not all. Taiwan electoral law also provides political parties another weapon to keep list legislators in line: the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act (公職人員選舉罷免法) specifies that any at-large legislator who loses his party membership will also immediately lose his seat.  Hence why Wang Jin-pyng was so vulnerable to a purge by President Ma: as an at-large legislator, his seat depends on the continued tacit support of the rest of the party.  Rather than wait until the run-up to the next election to deny Wang his previous position on the party list, Ma and his allies could remove him immediately by stripping him of his party membership.  It is only through a rather surprising, and lucky, district court injunction that Wang has so far survived the attempt to boot him from the legislature.

Whither Wang?

It's noteworthy that Wang Jin-pyng has not always been an at-large legislator for the KMT.  Until 2004, he was one of several legislators representing Kaohsiung County's First District, and a quite popular one at that.  If he were still a district legislator, stripping him of his party membership would not have had the same effect; he would have retained his seat.  That raises the question, why would a leading politician like Wang ever join the party list?

The answer is that it’s a sure-fire way to get into the legislature without having to win a district-level election.  Campaigns for legislative district seats were notoriously fierce, and costly, under the old SNTV system, because candidates had to compete for votes not only against nominees from other parties but also with their own fellow party members.  Winning a seat usually required relentless effort to differentiate oneself from everyone else and cultivate personal ties to constituents.  (And, all-too-frequently, some form of vote-buying.)  So when Wang first ran on the party list in 2004, when SNTV was still in place, it was undoubtedly appealing to him to leave behind the trouble of district campaigning.  The switch to single-member districts in 2008 eliminated most intra-party competition, but at that point Wang was already ensconced at the top of the KMT list and had no reason to return to a district.  

Now, of course, he does.  My money is on him returning to his old Kaohsiung County district and running there in 2016, where he retains a base and can probably win comfortably.  Whether or not he hangs on to his seat through the end of this term, I doubt we have seen the last of Speaker Wang.

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[* Taiwan's history of electoral system changes is dauntingly complex, even post-martial law era. I will attempt to cover it in a future post.]  

[**I'd forgotten, it's an electoral law rule, not an intra-party rule.  So all parties are required to reserve at least half their PR list seats for women.]