Taiwan studies has grown a lot as a field in the last 10 years. I was just at the American Political Science Association annual conference after a couple years of skipping it, and I was astounded at the large number of panels on Taiwan topics and the robust turnout from Taiwan at the event. That's in no small part due to the efforts of the Conference Group on Taiwan Studies (CGOTS), which has grown rapidly over that time period. When I was coordinating it 10 years ago, we had only two dedicated panels. At the 2025 conference, there were 18! 

Another additional sign of growth is in the number of young people with policy interests now developing expertise in Taiwan issues. About six years ago, the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in San Francisco proposed a program to fill a gap in the talent pipeline on Taiwan. That program, the U.S.-Taiwan Next Generation Working Group, provides some training for young to mid-career scholars in the United States with Taiwan expertise. I was fortunate to be part of the first cohort (right before and during COVID, which presented its own unique challenges), and I benefited greatly from the trips to DC and to Taiwan, and the training for media exposure and public-facing writing that the program organizes. The program is now on its third iteration and is expanding to include Europeans as well.

Applications are now open at the program's website at IEAS at Berkeley. Requirements to apply are: 

• Be either (1), an American citizen or U.S. permanent resident; or (2), a citizen or permanent resident from a European country, including the United Kingdom.
• Hold a faculty, research, or administrative position at a U.S. or Europe based institution of higher education OR have equivalent experience as a mid-career specialist in the private or public sector.

Full details on the program and how to apply can be found here. The deadline to apply is November 1, 2025. I have reposted the formal call for applications below. 

The Fulbright Taiwan program is still accepting applications until September 15. Their applicant pool is down from past years, and the Taipei office has sent out a special appeal to potential applicants. I repost that call below.

I have a new commentary out today at the Brookings Institution's U.S.-Taiwan Quarterly Analysis series on the aftermath of Taiwan's recall elections and what it means for the next 2 1/2 years of politics. I didn't get this observation into the piece, so let me just say here that in 25 years of watching Taiwan elections, the complete defeat of the recall votes is one of the most surprising outcomes I can remember -- perhaps second only to Han Kuo-yu's stunning win in Kaohsiung in 2018. I was way off in my predictions about the recall outcomes, as were most of the other analysts I followed. It's a good reminder that Taiwan voters are a fickle bunch, and to approach our analyses with a healthy dose of humility.

Anyway, the opening paragraphs are below: 

For the last 18 months, Taiwan politics has been out of equilibrium. The sweeping defeat last month of the attempt to remove 24 Kuomintang (KMT) legislators in a “great recall” demonstrated at least one incontrovertible truth: divided government is not going away. Taiwan’s political combatants now have an opportunity for a political reset. Let us hope that they seize it.

Political Uncertainty Drives Partisan Conflict
Taiwan’s previous elections in January 2024 delivered an ambiguous verdict. The ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) retained control of the executive branch but lost its majority in the legislature, while its primary opposition, the KMT, won a plurality of 52 seats (plus two allied independents) to the DPP’s 51. Far from indicating a strong mandate from the voters, however, the KMT’s victory rested on close wins in marginal constituencies and significant electoral malapportionment: across all districts, the party’s candidates won only 40% of the vote to the DPP’s 45%. Complicating matters further, for the first time in Taiwan’s democratic history, the balance of power was captured by a centrist party, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), founded by former Taipei mayor and presidential candidate Ko Wen-je. This unprecedented situation injected additional uncertainty into Taiwan politics and contributed to the rapid escalation of partisan conflict over President Lai Ching-te’s first year in office.

​For the rest, see the Brookings website. 

Also, a side note: in putting this piece together, I was struck by how much good English-language coverage there is now on Taiwan politics. So much so, in fact, that I wasn't initially sure I had anything original to say after so many others got there first.

So here I just want to give a shout-out to the growing roster of outlets and people doing good work on Taiwan politics, including: 

• Journal of Democracy, which published an online exclusive by Raymond Kuo which I found especially thought-provoking. 
• The Diplomat has had a lot of good coverage of the recalls featuring a variety of perspectives. 
• Jamestown China Brief on the recalls and the stakes for the KMT. 
• GTI Brief -- including some great work by Ben Levine. 
• Taiwan Insight, which had a whole special issue on the recalls. 
• FPRI -- especially pieces by Brendan Flynn and Joshua Freedman. 
• Financial Times has regular original stories on Taiwan issues, thanks to Kathrin Hille's dogged reporting. 
• Bloomberg, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal now all have reporters based locally doing good work. 
• Foreign Affairs even published something on domestic issues in Taiwan for once, even if they did give it a troll-y title as is their habit. Excellent work Lev and Wei-Ting for surviving the FA editorial process! 

And on top of that, we've got Taiwan-based outlets that have expanded and deepened coverage too, including: 

• Taipei Times, which now has not one but two regular columns, by Michael Turton and Courtney Donovan Smith. 
• The inimitable Frozen Garlic blog by Nathan Batto.
• New Bloom and the extremely prolific Brian Hioe, who apparently never sleeps. 
• Domino Theory. 
• Commonwealth Magazine. 

And too many others to list...

I can remember back in the Ma Ying-jeou era when English-language coverage was maybe a tenth of what it is now, and quite a bit shallower. I was going through old notes of that period recently and they reminded me of the parlous state of commentary on, for instance, the Sunflower Movement. So I find myself marveling now at the richness and diversity of English-language writing on Taiwan. I know I learn a lot from you all, so...thanks, and keep up the good work.   

I'm very late with this, but here's my attempt to make sense of the mass recall elections happening tomorrow in Taiwan. In all, there are 24 KMT legislators facing joint recall elections on July 26, and another seven on August 23. Taiwan's recall rules have a double-passage requirement: (1) at least 25 percent of eligible voters must vote yes, and (2) yes votes must be greater than no votes. This requirement was changed in 2016 by the DPP majority with support from the NPP (and current TPP leader Huang Kuo-chang), which lowered the threshold from a 50% turnout requirement.  

According to the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act, public officials cannot face a recall attempt until at least one year into their term. Since the current legislators were seated on February 1, 2024, the clock didn't start ticking on the recall campaign until February 1 of this year. But the threat of a recall of legislators was brewing much earlier, as early as June 2024 with the "Bluebird Movement" rally against the legislature's attempt to exercise more power over the executive branch. In response to this rally, KMT members started talking publicly about raising the recall threshold to something closer to where it was before; one proposal was that the "yes" votes must exceed the votes the representative received in the previous election, which would have made the current mass recall strategy all but impossible. One of the puzzles of this legislative term is why the KMT never actually followed through on this proposal, which would have saved them the trouble of defending all their legislators right now.

I have my own thoughts about that here -- I think the TPP probably blocked this change. But for this post I want to consider what would have to happen for the LY to flip control to the DPP, and how likely they are to do that. 

The DPP currently sits at 51 seats, and it needs to be at 57 for a majority. The simplest way for the party to reassume control is to recall KMT legislators and win the following by-elections in at least six districts. That would give the DPP the majority for the rest of the LY term. 

The second, temporary way is to succeed in recalling at least 12 KMT legislators; they're required to leave as soon as the votes are certified. So if any recalls pass, there will be a reduced number of legislators in the LY until the by-elections are held. If at least 12 are recalled, the total of KMT+TPP+2 blue independent seats will temporarily fall to 50 or less, handing the majority to the DPP for up to 60 days before by-elections are held and new legislators seated.

It is quite possible the recalls fall short of the 12 needed to shift control to the DPP immediately, but more than the 6 that could flip control if the DPP wins all the by-elections. That then sets up a hotly contested set of races in 30-60 days for the by-elections, and leaves the KMT+TPP temporarily still able to control the majority, but facing down up to another two months of uncertainty about their majority. 

Why are the recalls happening now? This has been an option since 2016, and recall elections have been held against three pan-green legislators in the past, so why is the recall mechanism only being employed as a mass campaign tactic now? To my mind, the most compelling answer is a series of strategic mistakes by the KMT over the last 18 months.

First, the 2024 election results did not deliver a decisive win for the KMT in the legislature. The headline number was the party winning 52 seats (plus two allied independents) to the DPP's 51. But if we look under the hood, the party actually came in 2nd in the party list vote, with 34.6% to the DPP's 36.2%, and in the constituencies, the KMT's vote share was five points behind the DPP's: 45.1% to 40.0%. It is only thanks to the disproportionality built into the electoral system that the KMT ended up with a plurality of LY seats at all. 

Second, this plurality was built on narrow wins in several marginal constituencies. Here's the list of 13 KMT legislators who were elected with less than 50% of the vote: 

• Taipei 4. Lee Yen-Hsiu. 47.6%. TSP won 11% here to split the pan-green vote.
• Taipei 8. Lai Shih-bao. 47.5%. TPP candidate won 15.4%. 
• New Taipei 7. Yeh Yuan-chih: 46.1%. Obasang Party candidate won 9% here.
• New Taipei 8. Chang Chih-lun. 42.7%. TPP candidate won 20% here. 
• Taoyuan 1. Niu Hsu-ting. 48.44%.
• Taoyuan 2. Tu Chuan-Chi. 48.2%. Tu beat the DPP candidate by ~1000 votes. 
• Taoyuan 6. Chiu Jo-hua. 40.93%. Three-way race with independent and TPP candidate, no DPP challenger.
• Keelung City. Lin Pei-yang. 43.6%.
• Hsinchu County 2. Lin Si-ming. 44.52%. NPP and DPP candidates split the rest. 
• Hsinchu City. Cheng Cheng-chien. 35.2-31.9% for the DPP candidate. A TPP candidate won most of the rest. 
• Nantou 2. Yu Hao. 49.8-47.3% over the DPP candidate. 
• Yunlin 1. Ting Hsueh-chung. 47.8-46.1% over DPP incumbent Su Chih-fen. Margin of about 3000 votes. 
• Taitung. Huang Chien-pin. 34.8-31.6% over DPP challenger. Former DPP legislator Liu Chao-hao won most of the rest. 

And here's a couple other seats that flipped to the KMT but were close races and are potentially vulnerable to a reversal:

• New Taipei 12. Liao Hsien-hsiang. 50.8-45.0% over DPP incumbent Lai Pin-yu. 
• Taichung 4. Liao Wei-hsiung. 50.0-47.4% over the DPP's Chang Liao Wan-chien.  
• Taichung 5. Huang Chien-hao. 51.55%.
• Taichung 6. Luo Ting-wei. 52.1%. 

By my quick and dirty count, that's already 17 legislators who should have entered this term pretty worried about the next election -- and by extension, about the recall happening tomorrow.

Given how shaky the KMT's plurality win in the 2024 election was, I've been surprised that these legislators in marginal districts have not been a more powerful moderating influence on the party caucus over the last 18 months. In particular, it was not helpful to their re-election prospects for the KMT caucus to immediately make Fu Kun-chi and Han Kuo-yu the faces of the party in the legislature: both are deeply polarizing figures widely reviled by the pan-green camp. Fu Kun-chi served a prison term for insider stock trading, then got out, got back into the legislature, and then in 2024 was made caucus chair. Han Kuo-yu was the KMT's presidential candidate in 2020, when he got crushed by Tsai Ing-wen, and then recalled a few months later as Kaohsiung mayor. One of the key purposes of party leaders is to protect vulnerable legislators, and the KMT has not done a great job of that.  

Third, as everyone knows now, the KMT's control of the LY depends crucially on the support of the TPP. I have gradually come to suspect that the TPP's collaboration with the KMT hasn't been as consistent or as sincere (rather than tactical) as a lot of DPP supporters are making it out to be. The TPP has publicly opposed the recall elections, but they haven't been willing to play institutional hardball on recalls in the same way they have with the constitutional court and oversight laws. I think some TPP members would be secretly fine if a few KMT legislators lost their recall campaigns. 

What this adds up to is a legislative majority built on sand. It was always a risky political strategy for the KMT party caucus to be so aggressive in confronting the Lai administration. And if they lose their plurality tomorrow, here's why. 

​There are three big moments in the last 18 months that really galvanized this recall movement. The first was the decision to insist on the legislative oversight bill as the top priority of the KMT and TPP, and to pass this package as soon as President Lai had taken office. Some of the changes included in these amendments were reasonable, and the DPP had even advocated for in the past; other parts (especially the requirement that the President give a state of the union address and take questions from legislators) was obviously unconstitutional. So the pan-blue opposition really decided to be aggressive right from the beginning, and they had to know that this would end up challenged by the Lai administration and its fate determined by the Constitutional Court.  

But then in October, when much of this package was indeed ruled unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court, both the KMT and TPP immediately sought to retaliate for the decision and voted down all of President Lai's nominees, leaving the court without its full complement. They then piled on and changed the Court Act to require a 2/3 quorum to meet, and the votes of at least 9 justices in favor of invalidating a law. That decision dramatically raised the stakes of the power struggle with the executive branch, and it led to a sense of a budding constitutional crisis. 

​Now, to be fair, there is a big problem with the court's appointment system: members are appointed for 8-year terms, non-renewable, and so the court is now filled entirely with Tsai Ing-wen appointees! It's easy to argue that it's a partisan court given that design. And with its decision to invalidate much of the oversight legislation, there was no reserve of goodwill from KMT-TPP to give Lai's court nominees the benefit of the doubt. 

But the KMT also sought to attack the court for a previous decision that narrowed the scope of the death penalty, which was a deeply cynical political calculation. It's worth pointing out that the Constitutional Court's ruling was based in part on the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which the KMT majority itself ratified and adopted as Taiwan law in 2009. Here's what Article 6, Clause 2 of the ICCPR says: 

The court didn't have much choice in this case if it was following the letter of the law. And yet the KMT then decided to accuse the court of overriding the will of the Taiwan people, because the death penalty remains popular in Taiwan. That may have been politically advantageous, but it was both hypocritical and morally repugnant.  

​The third ​big moment came in December, when the LY took a hatchet to the Lai administration's budget proposal. Again, the opposition's political strategy here in hindsight does not look great: they took aim at lots of budget items without much forewarning or justification, and they managed to tick off a lot of constituents reliant on that funding who they didn't need to make mad. It was quite clear at the time that both the KMT and TPP were simply looking for things to cut to make life hard for the central government. 

They also made a critical messaging mistake: they also cut items in the budget for the Ministry of National Defense. Yes, they targeted the indigenous submarine program, which the KMT has been critical of (for good reason) for a long time. And yes, the overall amount frozen and cut was not a large share of the MND's overall budget. But the optics were terrible -- when you're trying for the next six months to explain to foreign interlocutors that you're not "anti-defense" or "pro-China," just anti-DPP, you've already lost the narrative battle.   

Since the rules were changed in 2016, seven recall elections have made it to the actual voting stage. Here's what happened in each one. 

Huang Kuo-chang (NPP) in New Taipei 12. 16 December 2017.
Yes: 48,693
No: 21,748
Turnout: 27.75%
Yes threshold: 63,888​
Result: Recall failed. Yes votes came in 15k below threshold, although yes beat no. 

Han Kuo-yu (KMT) as Kaohsiung Mayor. 6 June 2020.
Yes: 939,090
No: 30,169
Turnout: 42.14%.
Yes threshold: 574,996 votes. 
Result: Recall passed. Yes votes came in almost 400k votes above threshold. KMT side mostly boycotted this vote. The DPP's Chen Chi-mai easily won the by-election. 

Wang Hao-yu (DPP) as city councilor in Taoyuan (SNTV district). 16 January 2021. 
Yes: 84,582 
No: 7,128
Turnout: 28.14%
Threshold: 81,940
Result: Wang recalled. 

Huang Jie as city councilor in Kaohsiung (SNTV district). 6 February 2021.
Yes: 55,261
No: 65,391 
Turnout: 41.54% 
Threshold: 72,892
Result: Huang survives easily, yeses fall 17k short, and no beats yes.
​
Freddy Lim (Ind, formerly NPP) in Taipei 9. 9 January 2021.  
Yes: 54,813
No: 43,340
Turnout: 41.93%
Threshold: 58,756
Result: recall fails by about 4000 votes. 

Chen Bo-wei (TSP) in Taichung 2. 23 October 2021.  
Yes: 77,899
No: 73,433
Turnout: 51.72%
Threshold: 73,744
Result: passed by about 4000 votes, Chen removed. But DPP candidate Lin Ching-yi won the by-election, 52-47%. 
​
Hsieh Kuo-liang (KMT) as Mayor of Keelung. 12 October 2024.
Yes: 69,934
No: 86,014
Turnout: 50.44%
Threshold: 77,700
Result: recall fails -- yes falls about 8k votes short, and no beats yes by 16k 

What I take away from these seven races:
 
Meeting the turnout threshold is still hard. Both Huang and Lim survived because the opposition couldn't drive enough "yes" voters to the polls. Chen Po-wei and Wang Hao-yu both lost but even in those cases the "yes" votes were barely above the required threshold. The only "yes" vote that was a blowout was Han Kuo-yu in Kaohsiung -- and he's arguably a special case since he was by that point a national figure and his polarizing campaign for president had ended just six months before. 

Partisan green-on-blue still matters. When turnout was high-ish, it was because the recall triggered dueling mobilization of DPP and KMT partisans. That saved Huang Jie (in green Kaohsiung) and Hsieh Kuo-liang (in blue-ish Keelung). If the generic partisan tendency of the electorate leans against the KMT, the incumbents should be worried. If it doesn't -- as is true in several of the highest-profile cases in the current round of recalls (e.g. Fun Kun-chi, Wang Hung-wei, and Hung Meng-kai) -- then they're probably able to survive if they can turn out their base.

Winning the by-election is no sure thing either. After Chen Po-wei got recalled, the DPP still picked up the seat in a bit of an upset against Yen Kuan-heng. I haven't shown it here, but by-elections have generally had very different turnout and dynamics than general elections, and it's not certain that a recall removal will lead to a change of that seat. So we need to be cautious about how we interpret the results tomorrow if more than 6 KMT legislators go down to defeat -- it's no guarantee the DPP is headed for a majority. 

I'm not going to attempt to forecast what will happen in these recall elections -- this is an unprecedented situation, and I don't have a good feel for three critical variables:

1. Will there be differential turnout among DPP vs KMT partisans?
2. What will TPP voters do? 
3. Will anyone else show up to vote? 

The answers to these three questions will determine how this mass recall election goes. On each question:

Differential Turnout: If the DPP turns out their base en masse, they're probably going to be able to win a couple recalls in the marginal districts (I'm looking at the seats in New Taipei and Taoyuan especially). If there's differential turnout, then maybe a couple KMT legislators in bluer districts go down in surprise defeats, too -- think Taipei 3 or Hsinchu County. 

One very crude way to estimate possible outcomes is to start with the data above, from the Election Study Center at NCCU. They updated their regular partisan trends estimate just last month. The last data point in the figure above shows the DPP outpacing the combined KMT and TPP partisanship: 31.6 to 29.5%.

Now imagine -- again, this is very crude -- that both sides mobilize their bases and in a best-case scenario get all of those partisan identifiers out to the polls to vote for their respective sides: pro-recall for DPP, anti-recall for KMT. 

In that case, the KMT has to worry. There's enough DPP partisans to push the yes vote over the threshold in some of these districts all by themselves. So the KMT has to mobilize to try to win the actual vote, and can't count on low turnout saving them. Also, there is a lot of anecdotal evidence of asymmetric enthusiasm here: DPP supporters have been fired up to vote for a year or more, and it feels existential to some of them. My sense is KMT supporters, less so. 

On TPP Supporters: So that then leaves the TPP voters. If TPP identifiers buy the party's messaging that this is an illegitimate power grab by the DPP and Lai, and also turn out en masse, then that will probably be enough to keep successful recalls below six. But I'm not confident of that at all -- TPP voters (and I suspect some members of the TPP caucus) wouldn't mind seeing a few KMT legislators go down and open up some LY seats as potential targets for the TPP. 

On Non-Partisans: I know the partisans are fired up about this election. But my prior is that those irregular voters who turn out in general elections but not in local or irregular elections -- anywhere from 10-25% of the electorate, judging by previous turnout rates -- are probably going to sit this one out. For the DPP's wildest dreams of a massive wipeout of KMT legislators to come true, they probably need turnout from irregular voters, too -- the cases above where an incumbent survived solely because the yes votes didn't meet the threshold look like a cautionary tale to me.

Bottom Line: I think it's going to be hard for the DPP to flip control of the LY via the recall. Just about everything has to break their way tomorrow, and in the following two months, to pull that off. For intellectual honesty's sake, I think this is the most likely outcome...

More than six but less than 12 KMT legislators get recalled tomorrow. 

More than zero but less than six of those seats then flip to the DPP in by-elections. 

​And...Taiwan is basically back where it's been for the last 18 months, with a (possibly chastened, or possibly unrepentant) KMT + TPP majority in the LY still facing off against a (possibly newly conciliatory, or possibly defiant) DPP executive branch.  

To recap the argument so far: The Taiwan People's Party (TPP) controls the critical voting bloc in the Legislative Yuan, but it has not maximized the leverage that voting bloc gives it. 

1. It has not sought to obtain offices (LY speaker or deputy speaker, or cabinet positions) for its members. 
2. It has not sought concrete policy concessions from either the DPP or KMT in return for its support. 
3. It has not tried to maximize its appeal to the general electorate, and it has behaved like a pan-blue party rather than a centrist one. 

​
This behavior is puzzling! 

What Is the TPP Doing? 
I have argued that the TPP is trying to bring about a partisan realignment within the pan-blue camp, away from the KMT. This is the only goal for which the TPP’s current strategy appears rational. It's an unusual strategy, but one that makes some sense given the political constraints the party faces.

Taiwan’s electoral institutions and party system present a high barrier to third-party growth. There is high party system institutionalization and politics and voting are now quite nationalized. The electoral system is permissive enough to allow small parties to gain a foothold in city councils and in the party list vote for the legislature, but they can never expand beyond small-party status unless they replace one of the Big Two. And no small party has ever succeeded in doing so in 30+ years of democratic elections.
 
So, to try to replace the KMT, the TPP needs to do two contradictory things at the same time.

1. Convince pan-blue voters they are one of them, and in particular, to appeal to older KMT supporters while holding onto their younger base.
2. Undermine the KMT, to change beliefs about the long-term viability of that party and convince their supporters that the TPP, not the KMT, is the future.

Now, if you were leading the TPP, how might you go about this? Toward the first goal, you'd pursue a public strategy of alignment with the KMT, especially on issues that you think make the DPP look bad. And toward the second, you'd quietly block legislation that would strengthen the KMT's grassroots or increase its popularity. 

Evidence for the first part of this strategy is obvious: Huang Kuo-chang is appearing in public regularly with the KMT, the TPP is publicly opposing the recall elections against KMT legislators, and (almost) everything controversial that has made it to a final vote in the LY has passed with joint KMT-TPP support over DPP objections. 

But what about the second? Can we find evidence of divergence of interests between the two party caucuses? This is harder to spot, because the TPP doesn't want KMT supporters to notice that it is trying to undermine the party's prospects. The TPP would rather be characterized as "marching in lockstep" with the KMT in its opposition to the DPP government, and everything else that matters to the KMT. 

But I don't think this is actually true.

To begin to see why this claim might be wrong, we need to talk about survivorship bias. Survivorship bias is the logical error of focusing on outcomes that survived a selection process, while overlooking those that did not. The classic example used to illustrate this form of bias comes from the Allied bombing campaign in World War II. The U.S. military did a systematic study of planes returning from bombing missions to try to understand how to improve aircraft survival while under fire. The study noted that certain areas like the wings and fuselage had more bullet holes than the rest, and recommended reinforcing these areas since they seemed to be getting hit a lot more. But this was a fallacy: a statistician, Abraham Wald, noted that the areas with the most bullet holes were places where the plane could be hit and still survive the mission. It was the other areas -- the ones that did not show much damage in surviving planes -- that were critical to surviving a bombing mission. Planes hit in the cockpit or engine simply didn't make it back, and so were not in the "sample" of planes examined.  

Now, what does the patterns of bomber survival in WWII have to do with the Taiwanese legislature? Well, there is also a selection process that occurs before bills introduced in the legislature come up for a vote. And we haven't paid adequate attention (and I include myself in this "we") to how that process might be skewing what we actually see being debated publicly, and being passed, by the TPP-KMT coalition over DPP objections. We need to consider the possibility that stuff the two pan-blue parties don't agree on never makes it to a vote. And it's possible this is happening a lot. 

​​The inference problem here is that we don't know what bills the TPP quietly blocked, because the vast majority of bills introduced in the LY don't come up for a vote. Moreover, as I noted above, the TPP doesn't generally want people to know when they disagree with the KMT on a bill. (And an important corollary: the KMT also doesn't want people to know that it is not all-powerful in the legislature. So it, too, has an incentive to play down disagreements.) But now that we have about 18 months of legislative actions to observe, there is a growing list of oddities in legislation that has passed, and just as importantly, not passed, during this term, and I think we have enough observations to discern a pattern here: the KMT is not getting blanket support from the TPP. 

For one, here are a few changes the DPP pushed through from 2016-2023 that hit KMT interests directly, and that the KMT screamed bloody murder about at the time, that have not so far been reversed. If the TPP is doing everything the KMT wants, I would expect to see reversals on some of these issues (I'll keep updating here as I come across more): 

• ​Farmer's and Fisherman's and Irrigation Associations changed from elected to appointed leadership.
• Pension reforms, which reduced the preferential benefits enjoyed by martial-law-era civil servants (mostly KMT supporters). 
• Actions by the Ill-Gotten Party Assets Committee to freeze or confiscate KMT party assets.
• [Update 2025.8.4] The Anti-Infiltration Act. Notably, the NPP under Huang Kuo-chang and Ko Wen-je separately supported passage of this act in 2019, while the KMT has been a consistent critic of it.

And here are a few controversial bills that the KMT caucus seemed to be gung-ho about that then quietly died, or ended up looking much different when they finally passed:

• Fu Kun-chi's special infrastructure budget bill. This would have allocated at least US$60bn to build two expressways and high speed rail to Hualien -- Fu Kun-chi's constituency. (to put that in context, Taiwan's annual defense budget is less than US$20 billion.) Speaker Han Kuo-yu and Deputy Speaker Johnny Chiang co-sponsored the two most controversial bills in that package. And then...crickets. Nothing ever came of this proposal. We don't know whether this was due to internal opposition from other members of the KMT or quiet TPP opposition, but it's an interesting data point.   
• Constitutional Court reform. Lots of changes to the court were proposed after the CC ruled against the LY oversight bill, most of them designed to limit the court's authority over the LY or paralyze it completely. But the final legislation ended up at the last moment with a different threshold of nine justices required to rule legislation unconstitutional, rather than a return to the two-thirds requirement before 2022. 
• Central-local government revenue division bill. I'm less confident about this one, but there were some more extreme proposals put forward in the debate about changing the formula for allocation of government revenues between central and local governments. What ended up in the bill was a 60-40 percent allocation, not as extreme as some of what was reported at the time. Here's what the TPP had originally proposed.

Why Didn't the KMT Raise the Recall Threshold?! 
And finally, the real smoking gun -- the bill that clued me in to this whole shadow game between the TPP and KMT -- is the amendment to the Civil Servants Elections and Recall Act that passed in December 2024. Various KMT members floated proposals to raise the recall threshold as early as June 2024, to protect them from the prospect of mass recalls that they are, in fact, now facing down in less than a week. Isn't it strange that the KMT saw this threat coming a year ahead of time, and still failed to protect its own legislators? 

I had long assumed this increase in the recall threshold was inevitable and that the activists preparing to collect recall signatures were wasting their time, because it was not in the KMT's interest to leave their legislators vulnerable to a potent recall movement that was clearly a threat even last summer. They simply couldn't not change this threshold if they had the votes -- it would be political malpractice not to. And in December, when the bill amending the Elections and Recall Act looked like it was headed for passage, the reporting on the proposal implied that the threshold would be raised. I thought so too. 

Except it wasn't! 

Why not? Well, way back in July 2024 Ko Wen-je was asked about this proposal, and he said he didn't support changing the threshold. The KMT tried, probably repeatedly over many months, to get the TPP to vote for this, and...failed. They didn't have the votes. Which is why the KMT is now facing mass recalls that could strip them of their control of the LY as soon as July 28.

This seems like it should be a huge part of the recall elections story, no? The KMT's coalition partner left them exposed to a mass recall. And while the KMT now has to engage in a desperate rear-guard struggle to preserve their seats, the TPP doesn't have to do anything because their legislators are all from the party list tier. (As an aside, if I were one of the KMT legislators facing a recall vote, I'd be pissed right now. The TPP hung them out to dry on this issue.)    

And as for why the TPP might want to block raising the recall threshold, but not call attention to themselves as the reason? I will leave that question as an exercise for the reader...

I've argued that the TPP is trying a different strategy to grow their party: they are trying to become the preeminent pan-blue party and replace the KMT.

Will they succeed? I don’t think so. They're missing a couple elements to pull this strategy off. 

First is talent. Right now the TPP has three names anyone has heard of: Ko Wen-je, Huang Kuo-chang, and Huang Shan-shan. Being generous, we might say Tsai Pi-ru and Kao Hung-an also have some name recognition. Beyond that? It’s a stretch. And Huang Kuo-chang is certainly not doing anything to share the spotlight with up-and-coming younger leaders. 

Second is grassroots supporters. That means more than simply an online army of fans who turn into your livestreams and like your posts on TikTok. What the DPP and KMT still have is grassroots party activists who can be mobilized to come out to rallies, to turn out to vote, and to, yes, collect signatures for recall elections. I haven't seen a whole lot of evidence the TPP has core supporters they can rely on to turn out around the island -- in Taipei, maybe, and perhaps Hsinchu, but elsewhere they are extremely weak at local levels. 

Contrast that with the DPP and, more importantly for present purposes, the KMT. I still remember clearly watching a KMT parade and rally in Taipei in January 2016, shortly before the presidential election that year. This was one of the most difficult periods in the KMT's recent history. It was the end of the Ma Ying-jeou presidency, and President Ma was deeply unpopular. The Sunflower Movement had succeeded in blocking Ma's signature cross-Strait trade agreement, the CSSTA, and the opposition stirred up by that project contributed to the KMT's sweeping defeat in the local elections in late 2014. The party then lurched from one political crisis to another over the next year. They ended up with the deep-blue firebrand Hung Hsiu-chu as their presidential candidate when everyone else declined to run, and then had to execute a late switch of candidate from Hung to party chairman Eric Chu in fall of 2015. The party's old nemesis James Soong then declared he would run (again!) as an independent candidate to give pan-blue voters a protest vote option. And at that point, everyone knew that Eric Chu was toast.  
 
And yet, on January 8, 2016, tens of thousands of KMT supporters nevertheless showed up in Taipei from all over Taiwan for an old-fashioned political parade down Roosevelt Road to Ketagalan Boulevard, to support a hopeless campaign heading for a crushing electoral defeat. Here’s a few pictures of that.

If the TPP is going to replace the KMT, it will have to convince even these diehard loyalists that the KMT’s future is hopeless. And it will need to build chapters of activists of its own.

I have always doubted Ko Wen-je is the right person for this kind of party-building work. Ko often has analogized party-building to running a business: cold, calculating, rational, and vote (profit?)-driven. That may be true for winning over swing voters. But if the only reason voters have to support you is that you're more "rational" than the next guy, what happens when they no longer believe that? What if there's another guy who comes along who offers better answers to their problems? The fans you've acquired, if they like you only because you "do the right thing," are going to abandon you when they no longer believe you have their best interests at heart. Success is easy come, easy go in this model.

There is, however, a different model of party-building in Taiwan, one that the DPP followed in its early days, which is based on identity appeals. "Our party stands for you. Our people are like you. We have suffered the same things you have. We speak the same language you have. You can trust us." Those appeals may turn some voters off...But for the DPP they also built a loyal following that has stuck with them through bad times as well as good. I just don't see the TPP doing the hard work of building those grassroots connections that can outlast any particular leader, either under Ko Wen-je or now, under Huang Kuo-chang.

Does the TPP Have a Future?: What To Look For
Putting this series of posts together has also clarified for me that the 2026 local elections are really critical for the TPP's future. Given Ko’s detention, Kao Hung-an’s suspension, and the party’s slump in the polls over the last year, they desperately need to demonstrate that they still have room to grow their electoral support. They need to develop a deeper bench of local talent – candidates who can win votes independently of the TPP’s brand and have crossover appeal. They need to run their own candidates – and win! – in some of the local mayor’s races. And they need to expand the number of seats they hold in the local councils (they won 14 last time – significant for a third party in Taiwan, but also only 1.5% of all seats.)

But the most fundamental question for the TPP in 2026 is whether to coordinate future nominations with the KMT. In 2023, Ko Wen-je rather naively assumed he could come to some kind of agreement with Eric Chu and Hou You-yi that would give him a clear path to the top of a joint presidential ticket. The spectacular way in which that agreement fell apart is a cautionary tale for the TPP. But for the party to have a chance of winning any of these offices in 2026, they still need to get the KMT to yield some nominations to TPP candidates. So the party is caught on the horns of a dilemma: cooperate and get absorbed, or don’t cooperate and throw elections to the DPP, or worse -- watch the KMT win these elections anyway and demonstrate the TPP is irrelevant. I’m not sure how they will resolve this dilemma. I’m more confident in predicting that the KMT will drive a hard bargain in any nomination negotiations, despite the TPP-KMT track record of cooperation in the LY right now, than I am in predicting the TPP's strategy in 2026.

So to wrap up, I’ll stick my neck out here and say flat out that I don’t think the TPP is going to succeed in initiating a partisan realignment away from the KMT, however they choose to approach 2026 (and 2028, for that matter). The party is much more likely to decline or collapse after the next election than to surge into second place and usher in a lasting change to Taiwan’s party system.

​But it is going to be fascinating to watch them try.

In the 1956 horror film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a small-town doctor (played by the inimitable Kevin McCarthy -- no not that Kevin McCarthy) discovers that people in his town are being replaced by emotionless, alien-controlled duplicates grown from plant-like pods. These "pod people" take over human bodies and erase their original personalities. As more and more of the townspeople are replaced, the doctor becomes increasingly desperate to warn the the community, but his pleas are met with skepticism, and then creepy indifference. The movie ends with the pod people, who now make up almost all of the town, chasing the doctor into a highway, where he spots a passing truck filled with yet more pods destined for who knows where. In the final scene he looks at the camera in panic and screams "You're next!!!" 

(The 1978 remake, set in San Francisco, is great, too -- including a cameo by the original Kevin McCarthy and a memorable performance by Donald Sutherland). 

Can the TPP Snatch Away the KMT Vote? 
In previous posts I speculated that the Taiwan People Party's (TPP) long-term growth strategy is different from other Taiwanese third parties that have come before. It has started in the center of the political spectrum rather than on one of the flanks. And it is now aiming to attract new support from the KMT's (mostly older) base while holding onto its (mostly younger) supporters.

It is, in other words, pursuing a party-snatching strategy. 

Now, I should have noted at the outset of these posts that this broader observation about the TPP's strategy is not in any way, shape or form unique to me; people in Taiwan have been ascribing some version of this motive to the party almost since the day Ko Wen-je founded the TPP in 2019. (For examples, see here, here, here, here, and here). 

I should also note there's a long tradition of wishcasting for a new "third force" to emerge in Taiwan politics that would break up the green-blue divide, eliminate the KMT, and realign politics around competition among multiple "Taiwan-centric" parties (in this framing the KMT is almost always described as "pro-China," pro-unification, or even pro-CCP), and compete with what these advocates see as an increasingly conservative and even plutocratic DPP. For a while after it was founded, the TPP looked like the most promising candidate to pull this off, which may explain some of the vitriol directed towards Ko and now new party leader Huang Kuo-chang for their cooperation with the KMT over the last year. 

But assertions that the KMT's destruction would come at the hands of a "third force" that was both more pro-independence and more progressive than the DPP have never made much sense to me, because they never spelled out exactly how the KMT's core supporters would be persuaded to switch to a new party whose positions on the China issue are so far away from their own. For instance, despite all the bravado surrounding the emergence of the NPP out of the Sunflower Movement, it always presented a much larger electoral threat to the DPP than the KMT -- one that Tsai Ing-wen as party chair recognized and smartly headed off through a pre-electoral coalition in 2016. The KMT has long had many electoral problems, but losing chunks of its base to upstart progressive pro-independence parties has never been a big concern for it.

Instead, the biggest threats to the KMT in the past have come from party defectors who walk and talk a lot like the official nominees but reject control from the party leadership -- think Terry Gou, or James Soong, or way back in the 1990s, Lin Yang-kang and Hau Pei-tsun. So if you want to build a party that can convince life-time KMT supporters to defect en masse in a national election, that party has to look a lot like the KMT. It has to be firmly in the pan-blue camp. It has to take a position on the China question that is more China-friendly than the DPP. And most of all, it has to actively oppose the DPP at every turn--despise it, even.  

I do not think it is a coincidence that the TPP is looking more and more like this party. I am skeptical they can actually succeed in causing a political realignment in which they replace the KMT as one of the Big Two. But they are certainly behaving in a way that makes sense if this is their ultimate goal. And, given Taiwan's institutional context, it is probably the TPP's best shot to survive past the next election. 

My thinking about this possibility has been influenced a lot by Gary Cox's work on elections as coordination games. The classic illustration of a coordination game is the so-called Battle of the Sexes. In this game, a man and a woman must independently choose whether to attend a baseball game or an opera performance. The man prefers the baseball game, while the woman prefers the opera, but both would rather spend time together than go to their preferred entertainment alone.

Putting aside the unfortunate sexist stereotypes of this example, the essence of a coordination problem is nicely demonstrated here; to quote Cox, "the players in the game would prefer to coordinate their actions on...one of two...possibilities, but they disagree over which of these possibilities ought to be the one on which they coordinate. There is thus an admixture of common and divergent interests, and the possibility of both successful coordination (to the relative advantage of one or more of the players over the others) and failed coordination (to the disadvantage of all)." 

Later in the book, Cox considers the possibility of partisan realignments as coordination problems. "Realignment projects," he writes, "require that a large number of politicians and voters change their behavior in a coordinated fashion." And not all realignments are equally plausible or consequential. Realignments in majoritarian electoral systems, Cox suggests, are both more difficult to pull off and more consequential if they succeed or fail. He illustrates the point with a discussion of the Liberal Party in Great Britain in the 1910s and 1920s, and the attempt by its dominant figure, David Lloyd George, to realign British politics along a socialist/anti-socialist axis.  

In Cox's telling, Lloyd George attempted to manipulate perceptions of the potential alternatives to the Liberal Party, which he believed to be facing an existential threat from the rise of the Labour Party. As prime minister leading a war-time coalition government, Lloyd George used his privileged position to communicate with his own Liberals and members of the Conservative Party to try to convince them to join forces after the end of World War I against Labour. His efforts to achieve an anti-Labour coalition had their greatest success in the December 1918 "Coupon Election," when the coalition Liberal-Conservative government that had just won the war endorsed a subset of members from both parties, isolating and defeating the Liberal faction led by Lloyd George's predecessor and rival, H.H. Asquith. But the coalition eventually broke apart in 1922, and the subsequent election saw the Conservatives contest and win on their own. The Liberals were reduced to minor party status and never recovered their previous position, as voters opposed to Labour converged on Conservative, rather than Liberal, candidates. And Lloyd George never again served in government. 
 
Cox portrays this failed attempt as a specific example of a realignment coordination game, with Lloyd George serving in the critical role of a "heresthetician" (to use William Riker's term) or "focal arbiter" (Thomas Schelling's): 

​Why am I going on about this example from early 20th century Britain? Well, I think there are some useful parallels here with Taiwan.

First, in both cases there is a party that the protagonists view as being in long-term decline because of shifting demographics -- the Liberals in the UK and the KMT in Taiwan. Second, in both there is high PSI, high nationalization, and a majoritarian electoral system -- less majoritarian in Taiwan than in the UK circa 1920, but as I noted in Part 2, still sufficiently so to deny a third party much of a future unless it replaces one of the Big Two parties. And third, one of the Big Two parties looks like a lot harder target to break apart than the other -- Labour in the UK, and the DPP in Taiwan. ​

I also find this framework helpful for clarifying the challenge Ko Wen-je faced as he sought to win the presidency in 2024. As mayor of Taipei for two terms, and then the leader of the TPP, Ko had a prominent position from which to try to reshape expectations among both political elites and the mass public about his electoral viability. He first tried to leverage this platform to convince KMT elites to coordinate on him for the presidential election--apparently under the belief that KMT leaders would recognize him, not Hou Yu-ih, as the stronger general election candidate. When that attempt failed, he then fell back on trying to persuade pan-blue voters to coordinate on him rather than Hou. Unfortunately for both Ko and Hou, that didn't happen: the anti-Lai vote ended up split between both. And doubly unfortunate for Ko, that split favored Hou over him; pan-blue and swing voters did not support him in large enough numbers even to bump him into second place.

So that left Ko and the TPP with a fairly hollow result: despite doing better than any third-party presidential candidate since James Soong in 2000, and winning a critical block of seats in the LY, the TPP still didn't eclipse the KMT in either the presidential or the LY PR vote. And in the current legislature, they may have the most influence that any third party has ever had -- but they're still the third party, not the second. To have a future, they need to move into second place. And the best way to do that is not self-evident.

Now, if you were leading the TPP, how would you try to grow from here? What Ko -- and now Huang Kuo-chang, since he has replaced Ko as party chair -- seem to have decided on is to try to execute a realignment of pan-blue voters away from the KMT and to the TPP. If that really is their ultimate goal, then they need to execute a two-pronged and somewhat contradictory strategy. First, they need to convince pan-blue voters that the TPP is one of them. And second, they need to find ways to weaken the KMT, or at least change core supporters' perceptions of the party, to the point that it looks less viable than the TPP in SMD elections -- the mayor's races in 2026, and the presidential and SMD LY races in 2028.

I think we can see evidence of both prongs of this strategy in the TPP's behavior over the last year. I'll pick that up in Part 4.

​In the previous post, I described what I think is the biggest mystery in Taiwan politics right now: the behavior of the Taiwan People's Party. The party is the kingmaker in the legislature but doesn't appear to have maximized its leverage over the last 18 months, and I have had trouble understanding what its strategy is.

I think I understand now. The TPP is all-in on votes, not offices or policy, but they are pursuing votes in an unusual way: rather than try to pull equally from both blue and green camps, which is what most observers thought they were doing in the run-up to 2024, they are now prioritizing pan-blue votes. The reason is that they are trying to take over the KMT's space in the political spectrum through a fundamental realignment of the pan-blue camp. 

So, rather than be a swing bloc in the legislature jumping between the camps issue by issue, they have instead decided for the moment to mimic the KMT. Even though most of their members are not ideologically aligned with the KMT--especially on the China issue--they nevertheless need to sound and act like a pan-blue party because they want deep blue voters to consider voting for their candidates in the future. 

To see both the rationale for this kind of strategy in Taiwan, and why the party's recent behavior and rhetoric makes sense if replacing the KMT is their ultimate goal, we first need to understand the political context in which they are operating.

There are three things about Taiwan's party system that make it rather distinct among young democracies, and hard for third parties to survive for long:

1. It has high party system institutionalization. Taiwan is unusual among young democracies in having a well-institutionalized party system. Party system institutionalization, or PSI, is the extent to which a party system is stable, predictable, and characterized by established patterns of interaction between political parties. We can measure PSI by looking at electoral volatility across elections, at the level of partisanship in the electorate, and the degree of coherence and organization of the individual political parties. On all these measures, Taiwan looks more like a mature democracy than a young Third Wave one -- it has relatively low electoral volatility, high partisanship, and well-organized and hierarchical political parties that compete with one another almost everywhere. 

2. It tends toward two-partism. Taiwan's effective number of parties (ENPs) in the legislature this term is 2.38. Since the new electoral system was used for the first time in 2008, this number has never exceeded 2.5: it was 2.44 in 2020; 2.17 in 2016, 2.23 in 2012, and 1.75 in 2008. The same two parties that finished 1-2 in 1992, the KMT and DPP, finished 2-1 in 2024, and they have been the top two vote and seat-winners in every legislative election in between. They also are almost always the top two finishers in mayoral races around the island. There are not many other Third Wave democracies that have had such a consistent pattern of two-party competition, and even among older democracies, the persistence of the same two parties winning in every election for 30 years is quite unusual.  

3. Voting patterns are highly nationalized. Party system nationalization refers to how consistent voting patterns are across a country. It has two components: static nationalization, or how much party vote shares vary across different localities or regions, and dynamic nationalization, or how much vote swings between the parties vary across these same jurisdictions. On the first, static, nationalization measure, although the two major parties have regional strongholds -- the DPP in the south, the KMT in the rural north, east coast, and offshore islands -- they both compete everywhere. There is no regionally-based party akin to the Parti Quebecois in Canada, or the Scottish National Party in the UK, or DMK, Shiv Sena, or Trinamool Congress Party (among many) in India. Nor do Taiwan's regional party strongholds look anywhere near as extreme as South Korea's, where the liberal camp routinely wins 80+% of the vote in the southwest (Jeolla), and the conservative camp wins 80+% in the southeast (Gyeongsang). And on the second, dynamic, nationalization measure, the swing between the DPP and KMT in each election has been remarkably consistent across the island. For instance, in the 2016 election, Tsai Ing-wen improved her vote share over her 2012 campaign in every single jurisdiction in Taiwan, and that increase varied only from about 5% in Penghu to about 12% in Taipei. 

Why does Taiwan's party system look this way? Three reasons. First, Taiwan's unusual pattern of bottom up democratization, starting with electoral competition at the local level and gradually culminating in direct election of the LY and the president, plus the survival of the formerly authoritarian KMT into the democratic era, led to the emergence of two big parties with strong grassroots chapters, a hierarchical structure, and similar party organizations. For the last 30 years, KMT and DPP candidates have run against each other almost everywhere in Taiwan, and they also dominate the majoritarian elections for the president, legislature, and city and county executives.

Second, the China question is by far the most salient issue in Taiwan politics and the only one on which all major political parties take distinct positions. The DPP and KMT are distinguished mostly by their different approaches to managing relations with the PRC; on most other policy issues, the Big Two are as divided internally as they are with each other. 

Third, and most important for present purposes, are Taiwan's electoral institutions. The LY is about 65% elected from single-member districts (SMDs) under plurality rule; about 30% from a proportional representation closed-list tier elected via a second party list ballot with a 5% threshold; and about 5% from two reserved indigenous multi-member districts (MMDs) using single-non-transferable vote (SNTV), each with three seats (M=3). The president is directly elected under plurality rule with no runoff, as are all local chief executives. And local councils are still elected using SNTV in relatively high-magnitude MMDs (typically M≥5). 

​​The consequences of this institutional setup are twofold. First, it is relatively easy for small parties to win a few seats in the legislature through the PR tier, and in local councils because of the high district magnitudes (meaning a lower share of the vote is needed to win a seat). The electoral systems for assemblies at both levels are permissive enough to allow the most successful third parties to survive for a while, and they can even occasionally end up in a kingmaker role controlling the balance of power, as the TPP has managed to do in the current legislature. But third parties face a much more daunting challenge if they want to become more than just small niche parties: they also have to win some of the SMD plurality races outright and not simply play a spoiler role in these elections. And to date, no third party in Taiwan has managed to succeed at this challenge. ​

Run on a Second Dimension Issue, or Be More Extreme
Most new parties in Taiwan have responded to this electoral context by adopting one of two strategies. Some of them have chosen to play down or ignore the China question altogether and campaign solely on a second-dimension issue: labor rights, environmental protection, religion, LGBTQ issues, indigenous rights, health care and social welfare, and so on.

A good example of this type of party is the Green Party Taiwan, whose history is detailed in Dafydd Fell's new book. The GPT was founded in the 1990s, and although it has stuck around much longer than most other third parties from that era, it has never succeeded in winning more than a single LY seat over that time period. And yet the Green Party Taiwan is actually one of the most successful examples of parties choosing this path, which is littered with electoral failures. There are hundreds of second-dimension parties that ran on an issue orthogonal to the China question and did not attract sufficient attention or votes to break through in races for the legislature or for local councils. Today, most of them are long gone and forgotten. 

The other strategy has been to take a more extreme position than the Big Two on the China question. This path has been more successful, and it is the one that the small parties people have actually heard of have used. For instance, to the pro-independence side of the DPP are the Taiwan Independence Party 建國黨, the Taiwan Solidarity Union 台聯, the New Power Party 時代力量, and the Taiwan State-Building Party 台灣基進黨; to the more pro-unification side of the KMT are the New Party 新黨, the People First Party 親民黨, and the China Unification Promotion Party 中國統一促進黨. (These are what Dafydd Fell, following Paul Lucardie, calls "purifier" parties).

Some of these parties have also leaned into a second-dimension issue on which one of the big parties is divided; for instance, the TSU was more protectionist and socially conservative than the DPP, and as Lev Nachman's new book details, the NPP was more socially liberal and pro-environment. Going further back in Taiwan, in the 1990s the New Party was pro-democratic reform and anti-corruption and sometimes teamed up with the DPP against the KMT on these issues, even though the two held polar opposite positions on the China question.  

The Small Party "Valley of Death" in Taiwan Politics
The problem for parties following the second path has been how to grow beyond the extremist fringe. When small parties have attempted to expand beyond the relative safety of MMDs to compete in SMDs, time and time again they have fallen into the "valley of death" (to borrow a term from the venture capital world): they cannot ever break through in enough single member district races to convince voters they are on track to replacing one of the Big Two, and they instead lose support and fade away. 

This pattern of failure occurs for two reasons. First, the Big Two don't just stand idly by. When third parties that are more extreme on the China issue run candidates in SMDs, they pose a more serious threat to the big party in their camp than simply competing in the PR list or local council races. Sometimes this party responds by offering a pre-electoral coalition, as the DPP did with the NPP in 2016, and the KMT did with the PFP in 2008; in both of these cases, the small party later got mostly absorbed into the larger party. Other times the big party goes on the offensive and attempts to knock out the smaller challenger, rallying its voters against the small party by portraying it as a traitor to the cause, as the DPP did with the Taiwan Independence Party in the late 1990s. But either way, the small party runs up against an insurmountable wall: they cannot win in the single member districts without attracting votes from some of the big party's supporters, and the big party has both the incentives and the means to prevent defections like this in most cases. 

Second, small parties are consistently disadvantaged by strategic voting. In Taiwan, the China factor is so important to so many voters that the incentives for strategic voting are quite strong in the SMD races: for the president and legislature for sure, and even occasionally in the local city and county executives. Voters don't want to waste their votes on a third-party candidate if it will throw the election to the big party they hate, so third party candidates have to convince people they are running not just to play spoiler but to actually win a three-way race against both of the Big Two. And breaking through in these single-member district elections is hard: there's a discontinuity between being perceived as the likely 2nd-place party and being in 3rd or lower. (The jargon-y political science term for this pattern is the M+1 rule: in any district of magnitude M, there will be at most M+1 viable candidates because most voters will ignore or abandon the rest). 

Put differently, although Taiwan's electoral institutions consistently provide some space for small parties to compete and win a few seats here and there, they do not provide room for more than two big parties -- at least as long as the party system remains highly institutionalized and voting patterns are nationalized. That means that if you lead a small party and hope to stick around in politics for the long term, you have only two choices: (1) join one of the big parties, or (2) replace one with your own. 

Now, with this context in mind, consider again the position of the Taiwan People's Party. The TPP is yet another third party trying to grow into a serious challenger to the Big Two. But since Ko Wen-je founded it in 2019, it has pursued a different strategy from other third parties: it positioned itself as centrist on the China issue, to the point where it adopted aquamarine (neither blue nor green) as its party color. And in addition to playing to the middle on China, it also leaned heavily on Ko's personal appeal to attract votes. 

By historical standards, this strategy worked. In the 2024 elections the party garnered over 20% of the party list vote, eight seats in the LY, and a kingmaker position in the LY for four years. No other party since 2008 has pulled that off. It's an impressive achievement!

And yet, it's not enough. All of the LY seats the TPP holds are via the party list; it didn't win a single district race. For a third-party candidate, Ko Wen-je did remarkably well in the presidential election -- but he still came in third. And now that he is detained indefinitely while he faces corruption charges, the TPP cannot count on Ko to win votes for them in the future and has to find some other way to appeal to the electorate. The party also no longer holds any local executive offices -- in 2022, Ko's preferred successor in Taipei, Huang Shan-shan, came in third behind the KMT's Chiang Wan-an and the DPP's Chen Shih-chung, and the party's one success story that year, Kao Hung-an's upset victory in the mayor's race in Hsinchu City, has effectively been reversed by Kao's subsequent suspension for padding her salary through reimbursements to non-existent staff while she was a legislator; she is likely to be recalled as mayor later this month.

So, despite holding a prime position in the LY right now, the TPP is also facing existential challenges. Can it reinvent itself as something more than the Ko-P party, now that Ko Wen-je is indefinitely sidelined? And if it wants not only to survive but also to thrive, it needs to find a way to displace one of the Big Two in some of the SMD seats. And what's the best strategy for that? Does it remain a free agent, swinging between green and blue depending on the issue, and get squeezed out in the next election (a la James Soong and the PFP)? Does it enter a pre-electoral coalition with one or the other, at the risk of absorption (like the NPP in 2016)? Or is there a third option? 

​I think they've decided on a more ambitious strategy: replacing the KMT. 

​For more on that strategy, see Part 3. 

For the past 18 months, the biggest puzzle in Taiwan politics has been the curious behavior of the Taiwan People's Party (TPP). In the 2024 elections, the TPP did very well for a third party, winning 22 percent of the party list vote and eight seats -- enough to break through the DPP-KMT duopoly to deny either of the two major parties a majority for the first time since the Chen Shui-bian era. That made it the kingmaker in the Legislative Yuan and gave it significant bargaining power over the other two parties in this term -- if they were able to exploit it.

The puzzle is that the TPP does not appear to have maximized its leverage in the current legislature. The party's leaders turned down opportunities to grab the speaker or deputy speaker positions or to negotiate for cabinet positions in a Lai government, and over the last year they have instead prioritized opposition to the DPP administration rather than conditional cooperation with the ruling party. More surprising still, they have publicly aligned themselves with the KMT on many of that party's most controversial policy initiatives -- even when those policies are broadly unpopular. 

This transformation of the TPP in the public eye from a centrist swing party to a "pan-blue subsidiary" has generated a widespread sense of angst and betrayal among pan-green commentators, who have accused the TPP of "subordinat[ing] itself blindly" and "march[ing] in lockstep with the KMT," and even tacitly cooperating with the CCP to oppose the DPP and the Lai administration. The TPP's public image has shifted so dramatically that many observers of Taiwan politics now simply assert that the legislature is "KMT-controlled."

The problem with this assertion is that it's wrong. The TPP legislative caucus is not actually marching in lockstep with the KMT on every issue, as I'll argue in what follows. On the contrary, it holds preferences that are quite distinct from the KMT, it has acted as a significant check on that party's legislative caucus, and its public cooperation with the KMT against the ruling DPP will be temporary and limited, rather than comprehensive and indefinite. But for their own reasons, neither the KMT nor the TPP want to advertise this fact. For the moment, they both would rather have everyone believe they are a unified pan-blue team cooperating to stop DPP overreach.

​No other explanation is consistent with the political outcomes of the last 18 months. 

The Hoover Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region held Boom or Bust: Can Taiwan Secure the Energy Supplies It Needs to Meet Its High-Tech Aspirations? on Thursday, April 10, 2025 from 3:30-5:30 pm PT at Shultz Auditorium, George P. Shultz Building.

The prowess of Taiwan’s semiconductor industry puts it at the center of the AI boom. Chips made in Taiwan power most of the leading AI platforms, and its data centers are expanding at a rapid pace, driven by tech giants in cloud computing, AI, and the semiconductor industry. But this boom is also straining Taiwan’s energy supplies: the surge in electricity demand is happening while the transition to zero-carbon sources of energy has fallen behind schedule, and its final nuclear plant is scheduled to be shut down this year. Taiwan also faces a rising military threat from the People’s Republic of China, and its heavy reliance on imported energy supplies is a serious security vulnerability.  
​
This event featured several experts with industry experience discussing these two parallel trends in Taiwan – the rapid AI-driven increases in demand for electricity, and the lagging development of new, more secure sources of carbon-free energy.  

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Peter Wu is the CEO of ASUS Cloud and Taiwan AI Service Corporation. He has led the development of AI Foundry Service (AFS), which advances on-premises AI deployment, cloud-based AI applications, and generative AI ecosystem to implement trust-worthy AI 2.0. In 2013, Dr. Wu represented Taiwan at the WTO Business Forum where he shared ASUS's development experience in cloud services, and he was appointed as a member of the Advisory Committee on Bio Taiwan Committee by Taiwan’s Executive Yuan in 2017 and 2019. In this capacity, he provided guidance and advice on the strategic direction of the biotechnology industry in Taiwan. From 2018 to 2020, he also managed the biggest AI supercomputer project in Taiwan, helping it to achieve its best-ever ranking of 20th in the TOP500. The project was then spun off into Taiwan AI Service Corporation, the first commercial AIHPC supercomputer cloud service provider in the Asia-Pacific. Dr. Wu is actively involved in various organizations and committees, including serving as the chairman of the Taiwan AI Alliance, and holds prominent roles in the fields of Smart Medical, AI, cloud computing, and others. 

Jane Yung-Jen Hsu is a professor and department chair of Computer Science and Information Engineering at National Taiwan University. Her research interests include multi-agent systems, intelligent data analysis, commonsense knowledge, and context-aware computing. Prof. Hsu is the director of the Intel-NTU Connected Context Computing Center, featuring global research collaboration among NTU, Intel, and the National Science Council of Taiwan. She is actively involved in many key international AI conferences as organizers and members of the program committee. In addition to serving as the President of Taiwanese Association for Artificial Intelligence (2013-2014), Prof. Hsu has been a member of AAAI, IEEE, ACM, Phi Tau Phi, and an executive committee member of the IEEE Technical Committee on E-Commerce (2000) and TAAI (2004-current).

Li-fu Lin is an adviser to Formosa Heavy Industries. He previously served as the vice chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission – recently renamed the Nuclear Safety Commission – which supervises Taiwan’s nuclear power plants, nuclear facilities, and the use of radioactive material in commercial and research activities. From 2009-2013, he was the program manager of Taiwan’s National Energy Program, leading the National Science and Technology Council’s Clean Coal Projects. He spent more than 30 years as a researcher at the Institute of Nuclear Research, including serving as general manager from 2004-2007. He holds a doctorate in mechanical engineering from University Karlsruhe in Germany. 

​Gwenyth Wang-Reeves is the Engagement Director for GE Vernova in Taiwan. She is responsible for establishing, and driving GE’s advocacy initiatives in Taiwan, engaging with local and central governments and other stakeholders on important public policy challenges, as well as advising the GE businesses on a broad range of regulatory issues. Prior to joining GE Vernova, Gwenyth was the Senior Director of Government and Public Affairs at the American Chamber of Commerce Taiwan. She has also held several senior policy roles at Taiwan’s National Security Council and Presidential Office, as well as the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Taiwan. Gwenyth holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the National Taiwan University, Master’s degrees in Political Communication at the Royal Holloway, and Democracy and Democratisation at the University of London and University College London, as well as a PhD in Politics and International Relations from the University of Warwick.

Vincent Chen, a Taiwan native, is an energy investment and policy specialist with a decade of experience in the private sector. From 2020 to 2023, he served as an investment manager at GSSG Solar, a U.S.-based renewable energy private equity fund, where he led the development of its power generation portfolio in Taiwan. His work included building Taiwan’s first hybrid solar energy and aquaculture project backed by a foreign investor. Before joining GSSG, Vincent led business development and fundraising at Jupiter Intelligence, a climate risk analytics provider, and Lucid Motors, an electric vehicle manufacturer. His research interests encompass power markets, environmental markets, and carbon border adjustments. He holds a master’s degree in international development economics from the Harvard Kennedy School and a bachelor’s degree in environmental economics from Stanford University.

The Hoover Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region hosted Trump and Taiwan: A Big, Beautiful Relationship or the Deal Maker’s Ultimate Bargaining Chip? on Tuesday, April 8, 2025 from 4:00-5:15 pm PT at Shultz Auditorium, George P. Shultz Building.

We are only in the first quarter of the first year of President Trump’s second term, but we’ve all already experienced a dizzying pace of activity. Whole federal agencies have been shuttered, some longstanding agency core missions have been upended, and we are suddenly in a trade war with unknown consequences. Ukraine has been dumped, then courted again. Canada is threatened with annexation, Greenland with invasion.

In the midst of this chaotic approach to governance, the U.S. Indo-Pacific policy is still to be defined. There are some disruptions such as new tariffs (though forecasted long ago), and the suspension of development assistance, but one could also cite policy continuity (e.g. AUKUS and the Quad) and a slew of traditional, conventional practices (e.g. leader visits with joint statements and annual military exercises). Yet absent the release of strategic documents such as a national security strategy, and absent a major address by the President or Cabinet official, the overriding feelings in the region are uncertainty and unease.

​This very much includes Taiwan. While Taiwan has pro-actively taken steps to earn the “right” kind of attention of the new U.S. Administration such as announcing major investments in the United States and increases to its defense budget, many critical questions remain. Are we on the cusp of a closer, stronger relationship with Taiwan with enduring commitments, or are we building trade space for President Trump’s next big deal with China? Mr. Schriver will explore these important topics based on his three decades of policy work related to Taiwan and the Indo-pacific, as well as his services as a senior official in the first Trump Administration.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
​
Mr. Randall Schriver is the Chairman of the Board of the Project 2049 Institute and a Partner at Pacific Solutions LLC.  In January 2022, he was appointed as a Commissioner to the U.S. – China Security and Economic Review Commission and currently serves the Commission as the Vice Chairman.  He is also a lecturer for Stanford University’s “Stanford-in-Washington” program, is on the Board of Advisors to the Sasakawa Peace Foundation USA, and Board of Directors of the US-Taiwan Business Council.

Mr. Schriver served from 2018-19 as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs. He also served from 2003-05 as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, during which his portfolio included China, Taiwan, Mongolia, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands. From 2001 to 2003, he was Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor to the Deputy Secretary of State. From 1994 to 1998, he worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, including as the senior official responsible for U.S. bilateral relations with the People's Liberation Army and the bilateral security and military relationships with Taiwan.

Prior to his civilian service, he served as an active-duty Navy Intelligence Officer from 1989 to 1991, including a deployment in support of Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm. After active duty, he served in the Navy Reserves for nine years, including as Special Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and an attaché at U.S. Embassies Beijing and Ulaanbaatar.