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. 

I've been in Taiwan now for almost three weeks, first with a group of Stanford students on a study trip and then as part of the North American Fulbright observation tour. These groups have both met with all the campaigns and a huge number of people, and it's been a firehose of information. Now that the campaign is officially over (as of midnight Jan 12 Taiwan time), I have some jumbled thoughts on what just transpired.

This campaign seems pretty subdued. i was also here in 2020, when Han Kuo-yu was the KMT nominee. He was an exceptionally polarizing candidate -- the deep blue KMT base loved him and many of them were convinced he was going to win. The green camp saw him as an existential threat to Taiwan. That campaign featured Lai Ching-te challenging Tsai Ing-wen for the DPP nomination, and the eruption of protests in Hong Kong. By the end of the campaign, most of the swing voters made up their minds for Tsai. Turnout jumped 9 points from 66-75% and she won easily. 

In contrast, this time around the election campaign cycle was rather quiet for months -- one might even say boring. The polls showed little movement after Hou and Lai were formally nominated in June. There was a spike in interest when Terry Gou (remember him?) registered for a signature drive to run as an independent. And there was another in the run-up to November 24, when the prospect of Blue-White KMT-TPP cooperation on a joint presidential ticket got real, and then the deal fell apart, and then all three candidates announced their VP nominees and Gou declined to run (and now, to endorse anyone -- he's completely dropped out of sight!) The last month has felt more amped up, but the policy rollouts, debates, late breaking scandals, and insults have all felt very...normal...for a Taiwan presidential election campaign. There's just not the same sense of existential threat or inspiration that we saw in 2020 or 2016. 

On Cross-Strait and US-Taiwan relations, there really isn't much difference between the three presidential candidates. The distinctions between them are harder to parse out than they were in past elections. Hou has tacked the KMT to the center, especially on defense policy and relations with the U.S.; Lai promises to continue Tsai's approach and shake off the accusation he's deeper green than she is; and to the extent Ko can be pinned down at all he's tried to squeeze himself somewhere in the constricting space between the two, supporting the call for defense budget increases while also embracing the KMT's call to revive the Cross-Strait Services Trade Agreement (CSSTA) with Beijing. 

The stakes look very different to international audiences. The gap between the general domestic vibe and the framing of this race in many international media outlets has become a chasm. Read the English-language press and the headlines framed this as the election that could change the world. Meanwhile, the reaction of young voters, especially, that we've talked to has been a collective shrug. All three candidates are flawed in their own ways, and even people from their own campaigns will admit it privately. Nor do most people expect fundamental changes to come about as a result of this election. Add it all up and it's a recipe for low turnout. 

The legislative races are once again overshadowed, but quite important. The conventional wisdom we're heard is that the DPP will lose its majority -- it has 63 seats right now but is likely to lose at least 10, putting it below the 57/113 it needs. The KMT will be the main beneficiary -- possibly picking up 10 seats or more in the districts. And the TPP is likely to increase its seat share mostly via the party list vote -- last time it won five seats on 11.7% of the vote, and if it doubles that (23-4%) it would have 10 seats. The KMT has also yielded four districts to the TPP but they're all quite green, so I'd be surprised if the TPP has a single district legislator next month. 

So, what we're looking at most likely is a split legislature, with both the DPP and KMT at roughly 48-53, and the TPP in the middle with 9-11. It's even possible that 2-5 independents could win and collectively be crucial to the legislative majority. Whoever wins the presidency is going to have to deal with multi-party politics and do coalition-building issue by issue in the LY. 

In the interest of intellectual honesty, let me put down a few expectations for today's results. 

Turnout will be down. My prior here is that it will be close to the 2016 level, at say 66-69%. The weather is good but, again, subdued campaign with flawed candidates.  

The TPP's party list vote will be close to Ko's vote share. For once, the party list, which is decided by voters' second vote, is potentially crucial to determining the balance of power in the LY. In the absence of other information I'm guessing the TPP's list will do about as well as Ko does in the presidential race. 

The KMT comes close but does not surpass the DPP as the largest party in the Legislative Yuan. The electoral system has a slight (2-5 seats) bias in favor of the KMT, and at this point I think we can say the party's candidates typically do better in the district races, where family legacy, constituent service, factional ties, and other things that localize voting patterns matter more than in the presidential election. Going through district by district, my best guess is that the KMT picks up a net of 5 seats in the greater Taipei area (Taipei, New Taipei, and Keelung [UPDATE: and Taoyuan]), holds in Hsinchu and Miaoli, nets 4 seats in central Taiwan (Taichung, Nantou, Changhua), and flips 2 elsewhere (Tainan, Kaohsiung, Pingtung, Taitung, Yilan, etc. [UPDATE: and Yunlin, Chiayi]) KMT candidates will probably also win back at least one of the two seats in the indigenous districts (1 highland, 1 lowland) that the DPP holds now. That would net the party 12 seats, putting them at 50. The DPP drop in this scenario is around the same which would put them at 51 seats.   

It's also not fully appreciated how close they were in the PR list last election: the DPP won 34% and the KMT 33% there (both got 13 seats). If both parties are mostly relying on core supporters to cast a party vote, as they did last time, then I'd expect them to look similar again, maybe down a seat or two from 2020. Let's call it 1 seat down for each.

Add that up and we've got KMT 49, DPP 50, TPP 10, and others 4.  

​And finally...

I think Lai wins the presidential race, but it's pretty close. He's been ahead in the polls all year, by a little to a lot; not one reliable polling company ever found Hou in the lead. I expected dissatisfaction with the DPP government to manifest in soft numbers for Lai, which it did -- he's rarely if ever broken 40% in polls over the last six months, and clear majorities support a change in ruling party in this election. But I also expected eventually anti-DPP voters would finally converge around Hou, and that doesn't appear to have happened. Instead they have remained divided on who they would prefer to see instead, and even on who is the strongest candidate (Ko or Hou) if they are to vote strategically. In the end this probably dooms Hou's chances of pulling the upset. Ko's enduring strength has surprised me, but his chances depend greatly on support from the most fickle potential voters: those in the youngest cohorts (below roughly 28yo), and I still expect him to finish a clear third.

With Ko soaking up a lot of the disaffected voters, and with both parties turning out their bases and not attracting much beyond, I expect the larger generic size of the green camp to be decisive. I'll predict: Lai wins with about 40%, Hou with 35%, and Ko with 25%. I'm not going to venture a guess about the final raw vote tallies but I will go out on a limb and predict Hou won't hit Han Kuo-yu's 5.5 million in 2020; and Lai will fall short of the 6 million mark that Tsai hit in all three of her campaigns.  

In my latest piece for Taiwan Insight, I consider the lack of absentee or early voting options for people stuck in quarantine or who were COVID-positive during the 2022 Taiwan local elections.

I'm pretty critical of Taiwan's leadership here: they had more than two years to think about this problem, but they didn't learn from the rest of the world and were woefully underprepared to hold an election during a pandemic. 65k people were denied the right to vote as a result.

​That is indefensible. It is long past time for Taiwan to introduce alternative ways to vote for citizens who can't physically access their polling stations. Korea and Japan share similar electoral administrative features, but they are way ahead of Taiwan now.

"With its colourful and fiercely contested campaigns, efficient electoral administration, and universal acceptance of the results, Taiwan’s recent local elections were, in most ways, a sign of a vibrant and healthy democracy. But one aspect failed to live up to basic democratic standards: thousands of people were denied the right to vote because they were trapped in mandatory COVID quarantine. After nearly three years of dealing with a global pandemic, Taiwan’s leaders should have been able to find some way to accommodate these citizens, as many other countries around the world have managed to do under much more difficult circumstances. Instead, they ignored the issue, and many Taiwanese were denied the right to vote. Taiwan’s democracy has received much recognition recently for its impressive vitality and resilience. But on voting rights, it is now a laggard. It can and must do better."

The rest of this piece appears at Taiwan Insight. 

​Taiwan's local elections are set for Saturday, November 26, with voting hours between 8am-4pm. The vote count will take place in full view of the public at the polling stations as soon as polls close and the last vote has been cast. This decentralized hand count means that the final results will be reported relatively fast (at least by American standards), by midnight local time, and most winners in the high-profile races will be known by 8pm. 

As we wait for the results to roll in, I thought it would be useful to note some of the more distinctive features of Taiwan's system of election management. For readers interested in delving deeper into these issues, I have a working paper on elections in Taiwan that will come out next year in an edited book volume on electoral malpractice and manipulation in Asia. I also did a Twitter thread on the 2020 elections that may be of interest. 

1. No absentee or early voting. Taiwan has never had either option. Instead, voters have to return to the place where their household is registered. Voter rolls are generated automatically from the country's household registration system 20 days before the election, and voters are assigned a precinct based on their official residence.

The downsides of this system are obvious: it places a disproportionate burden on people who live far from their official place of residence, including college students, active-duty military personnel, and overseas citizens. But there are advantages too: voter registration is automatic, ballot distribution and security is streamlined, and the count can take place at the polling place itself and be wrapped up quickly. (Compare with California, where we are still counting ballots for an election that happened on November 8.)

There are also historical reasons why mail-in and early voting options are viewed with skepticism by Taiwan's two major political parties. In the bad old days of martial law, ballot-stuffing was a serious problem in some races. Public vote counts, official campaign observers, and tight controls on blank ballots were developed to combat fraud, as this excellent book chapter by Su Yen-tu documents.

Unfortunately, with Taiwan still dealing with COVID quarantine restrictions, it appears that about 65,000 eligible voters will be trapped in quarantine and unable to vote. Don't blame the Central Election Commission for this: they're just following the election law, which has no provisions for alternative ways to cast a vote. Instead, blame the CECC, which has kept in place a five-day mandatory quarantine for people testing positive, and the legislature, which would need to amend the election law to allow for either early or absentee voting.        

I hope the controversy here starts a more serious discussion about how to add alternative voting methods without undermining the many strengths of Taiwan's electoral process. My own view is that the current system could be adapted to allow early voting much more easily than absentee or mail. For one, early voting wouldn't necessarily require ballot transfers between different precincts, and votes could be kept on-site and counted at the same time as same-day votes. The prospect of absentee voting in Taiwan makes me very nervous: it's much more susceptible to vote-buying, and it also has the potential to completely undermine trust in election outcomes. Imagine, for instance, if a couple hundred thousand ballots cast in mainland China arrived by mail after the election, and swung several critical races toward China-friendly candidates. It would be impossible to persuade most people that those votes were cast freely, without coercion by the CCP...

2. Restrictions on campaign activities. The Civil Servants Elections and Recall Law includes a lot of restrictions on how and where candidates can campaign, what they can pass out, and even when they can officially campaign (only during the 15 days before the election for mayors and county executives, and only five for lower offices!). But in practice, the CEC is only in a position to enforce a few of these, since Taiwan's quite liberal freedom of speech and assembly protections supersede many of these restrictions.

Among the rules that the CEC still strictly enforces are limits on the value of campaign materials passed out to voters (NT$30 per item per person), the time of day campaigns can take place, (7am-10pm), and a blanket ban on campaign activities during Election Day itself, beginning at midnight. Voters cannot wear any kind of clothing with campaign insignias on it to vote, either -- including masks -- and no campaign posters or paraphernalia can be posted within 30 meters of a polling station. Voters cannot use phones or cameras to video during the voting process, either.    

The ban on election-day campaigning has been extended to cyberspace as well, and the CEC takes it very seriously. In 2012, for instance, the Ma Ying-jeou Facebook page posted a simple reminder to supporters on Election Day reminding them to turn out to vote for Ma, and the CEC interpreted this as a violation of the campaign prohibition and fined the Ma campaign NT$500,000. 

The election law also imposes a polling blackout during the 10 days before the election. You may have noticed all the polls on the TVBS polling site are currently down to comply with this restriction -- they'll be back up as soon as the election results are known.   

Finally, if these limits seem intrusive to you, it's worth noting that Taiwan's election restrictions are in practice quite liberal when compared to South Korea, Japan, Singapore, or Malaysia, as this article by Jong-sung You details. Taiwan is a positive outlier in the region on this dimension.  

3. Campaign deposits and campaign subsidies. All candidates for elected office have to pay a deposit in order to qualify for the ballot. The CEC has the discretion to set the amount, which varies by prominence of office. For 2022, the deposit requirements for candidates were:

• special municipalities: mayor - NT$1.5 million; city councilor - NT$200,000
• counties and cities: mayor - NT$200,000; councilor - NT$150,000
• township/town/city: head - NT$150,000; representative - NT$120,000
• special municipality indigenous district: head - NT$150,000; representative - NT$50,000
• village/ward chief: NT$50,000

Candidates receive a refund of this deposit only if they obtain more than 1/10 of the winner's vote share, which a lot of minor candidates do not. One of the more curious features of Taiwan elections is just how many fringe or vanity candidates are willing to spend the considerable sums necessary to qualify for the ballot with little hope of actually getting their deposits back.  

Taiwan also has public subsidies for both political parties and individual candidates. Political parties get a payout every year in proportion to the share of the party vote they got in the last legislative election. Individual candidates in the local elections receive a subsidy after the election of NT$30 per vote received, but only if they obtain at least 1/3 of the winner's vote share. 

These rules appear to me to strike a reasonable balance between allowing access to the ballot for serious candidates, while still discouraging completely frivolous ones. They also include several provisions that increase the value of belonging to a political party, and that tend to privilege the larger, longer-established parties over smaller ones and independent candidates -- all good things for democracy in my view.

4. What if a candidate dies? Article 30 of the Civil Servants Elections and Recall Act specifies that if a candidate dies after the registration deadline, but before Election Day, the election should be stopped and every step in the process redone with a new slate of candidates: announcement of a new Election Day, registration, drawing of ballot numbers, printing of ballots, and so forth. This actually happened in Chiayi City this election cycle: an independent candidate for mayor, Huang Shao-tsung (黃紹聰), was found dead at home, apparently of a heart attack, on November 2.

The CEC has some discretion to decide how to redo the election process, and in the Chiayi City case they decided to postpone Election Day for the mayor's race to December 18. All the rest of the elections in Chiayi City, for councilors and ward chiefs, will still be held on November 26. I'm not sure how common this solution to the death of a candidate is around the world, but it's unheard-of in the US.  

5. Poll workers can be nominated by the candidates themselves. A majority of poll workers, including the head manager and supervisor, are required to be civil servants -- many of them schoolteachers. In fact, according to the Elections and Recall Law Article 59, civil servants are required to serve as poll workers if nominated. In addition, political parties and all candidates themselves can nominate some poll workers in each precinct; workers are drawn by lot when the number of nominees exceeds the required number.

This poll worker provision was introduced in the 1960s to act as a check on the ballot stuffing and fraud that frequently occurred then, and it offered candidates a way to monitor each ballot box and increase trust in the vote count. It's generally worked quite well ever since. By far the biggest threat to electoral integrity in Taiwan since the 1980s has been vote-buying, rather than fraud at the ballot box. 

August 1 is Indigenous Peoples' Day in Taiwan--a day that usually passes without much media attention. This year is different: President Tsai Ing-wen is planning to issue a formal apology on behalf of the Republic of China government to Taiwan's indigenous peoples and to outline her government's indigenous policies. That has now become a partisan issue. Five of the six aborigine (原住民 yuanzhumin) district representatives in the current Legislative Yuan are going to skip the event; the only one to attend is the only district DPP member, Chen Ying (陳瑩). The other two legislators, Kolas Yotaka (谷辣斯·尤達卡) of the DPP and Kawlo Iyun Pacidal (高潞·以用·巴魕剌) of the NPP, are both party list legislators, and so have to take their own party line into greater account. 

Although they're often overlooked in writing about Taiwan's electoral politics, Taiwan has reserved seats in the Legislative Yuan for aborigine representatives since 1972. Today, representatives from these districts hold more than 5% of the total seats in the legislature (6/113)--if they were all part of the same party, they would be the third largest in the LY, ahead of both the NPP and PFP. For anyone interested in learning more, I have a CDDRL working paper on the history of these seats and the evolution of aborigine representation in the Legislative Yuan. The abstract is below. 

​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.

One of the major advantages the DPP has had over the KMT in this election cycle is its cooperative relationship with the smaller upstart parties on its flanks: the Taiwan Solidarity Union (台聯), the Social Democratic Party-Green Party (社會民主黨 － 台灣綠黨) alliance, and above all the New Power Party (時代力量).

The TSU is the DPP's traditional ally, and the two worked fairly closely together in 2012 to coordinate nominations: the TSU avoided running candidates against DPP nominees in the districts, and the DPP encouraged deep green voters to consider casting a party list vote for the TSU. That strategy paid off for the pan-green camp when the TSU won 8.96% of the party list vote, which returned it to the LY after a four-year absence. And in the districts, the DPP candidates won all but four constituencies that Tsai Ing-wen carried (and six that she didn't.)

Unfortunately for the TSU, it isn't looking so hot in the polls right now and probably won't win the five percent of the party list vote it needs to retain seats in the legislature. It's likely to be replaced by the NPP, which was founded only about a year ago and is running several high-profile candidates in district races. This could have been a major problem for the DPP: a new pan-green party with a strong pro-independence slant and brash leadership, targeting the same youth vote that the DPP is counting on to help it win a majority in the LY, and without a past history of coordination in elections.   

Instead, the DPP leadership recognized this threat early on and worked out a cooperation agreement: the party would yield several districts to the NPP (only three, as it turned out), and the NPP would only campaign in those districts to avoid splitting the pan-green vote elsewhere. The arrangement has worked well enough that Tsai Ing-wen is even showing up to appear with some of the NPP candidates.

The DPP has pursued a similar approach to cooperation with candidates from other groupings, yielding several other seats to small parties. Via Solidarity.tw, here's the list of small-party candidates the DPP has endorsed:  

• Taipei 3: Billy Pan (潘建志), Independent
• Taipei 4: Huang Shan-shan (黃珊珊), People First Party
• Taipei 5: Freddy Lim (林昶佐), New Power Party
• Taipei 6: Fan Yun (范雲), SDP-Green alliance
• Taipei 7: Yang Shih-chiu (楊實秋), Independent
• ​Taipei 8: Lee Ching-yuan (李慶元), Independent
• New Taipei 9: Lee Hsing-chang (李幸長), Independent
• New Taipei 12: Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌), New Power Party
• Taoyuan 6: Chao Cheng-yu (趙正宇), Independent
• Taichung 3: Hung Tzu-yung (洪慈庸), New Power Party
• Taichung 5: Liu Kuo-lung (劉國隆), TSU

11 seats seems like a lot to yield, right? Isn't this a costly signal that the DPP is willing to weaken its shot at a majority in order to defeat the KMT and forge a broad coalition in the LY? Well, let's step back and see just how crucial these seats are to a DPP majority. Here's the list of district seats ranked by how large Tsai Ing-wen's lead or deficit was in 2012, with the yielded districts marked in yellow (all of them are currently held by the KMT): 

Remember that the DPP needs about 41 district seats to win a single-party majority in the LY. Notice where almost all the yielded seats lie? Below #41. Waaaaay below, in fact. If some of these seats go to third-party candidates, the DPP is already going to have a majority all by itself.

I noted this in a previous post, but it's worth reiterating here: this is smart politics by the DPP. They're ceding races that are not very competitive to third parties and independents in exchange for non-compete agreements in the critical races in the 25-45 range. (In fact, this ranking probably understates just how difficult some of these seats are: Taipei is more reliably blue than the rest of the island, so the swing toward Tsai there is likely to be lower than elsewhere.)

How Much is One District Worth?
One "yellow" district is high up the list, though, and it's a very interesting one: Taichung 3 is ranked #30. What's going on there? The NPP has nominated Hung Tzu-yung, and the DPP is not running a candidate. Like the NPP candidates elsewhere, Hung is already a well-known figure in Taiwan: she is the sister of Hung Chung-chiu (洪仲丘), a military conscript who died in July 2013 as the result of harsh punishment by his superiors. (The incident triggered large protests, the resignation of the Minister of National Defense, and the rapid passage of a far-reaching reform of the military justice system.)

​By generic partisan lean, Taichung 3 is by far the most competitive district of any the DPP has yielded; a swing of just 2.33% toward Tsai would turn it green. If Hung can run anywhere close to Tsai's 2016 total in this district, she should win it easily. So, of the NPP candidates running for district seats, it's Hung, not Huang Kuo-chang (in New Taipei 12) or Freddy Lim (in Taipei 5), who is best positioned to win in 2016.

It's likely that the threat of NPP candidacies in critical races elsewhere gave them the bargaining power to get the DPP to yield Taichung 3, and as a result they're well-positioned to win at least one district seat, in addition to whatever they get from the party list. From the DPP's perspective, this is a good trade as well: they cede one competitive district for a full non-compete agreement everywhere else. And with one prominent exception, the deal has held. ​

The Curious Case of Hsinchu City
​That exception is Hsinchu City, where the DPP Legislative Yuan party caucus leader Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘) is running against both the KMT nominee Cheng Cheng-chien (鄭正鈐), a city council member, and the NPP's Chiu Hsien-chih (邱顯智). Ker is widely disliked by the NPP's core supporters, and Chiu has refused to withdraw from the race, creating the possibility of a serious pan-green split in the vote. With a big enough swing (11-12%) toward Tsai, this seat could be competitive, but it's likely to be close even then, so Chiu's candidacy could well be fatal to Ker's chances.

What's especially intriguing about this race is the possibility of an ulterior motive for the NPP, and possibly some elements of the DPP, too. As party caucus leader, Ker is in line to be the next speaker of the LY if he wins re-election, and he's likely to try to block any meaningful reforms of the cross-party negotiation mechanism (政黨協商) that has given the current speaker, Wang Jin-pyng, tremendous influence over the legislative process. That in turn could prevent Tsai Ing-wen from getting much of her policy agenda through the LY. I have no idea if Chiu's campaign is a deliberate strategy to take out Ker, but from the NPP's point of view, preventing Ker from winning re-election might just be worth splitting the pan-green vote and throwing the seat to the KMT. Some of that animosity clearly comes from Ker's long history of deal-making in the LY and his role as the key DPP member in closed-door cross-party negotiations. For instance, it's easy to forget that he was actually at the center of the special influence case that caused the open rift between Wang Jin-pyng and Ma Ying-jeou--it was a case against Ker that Wang leaned on prosecutors not to appeal.

By the way, isn't it curious that Ker is fighting for re-election in such a tough place for the DPP? (Tsai lost here in 2012 by 21 points.) How did this happen to the party caucus chair?! Ker was previously a party-list legislator for two terms, so by DPP party rules he has to run in a district now. Unlike the KMT, which flagrantly violated its own rules to allow Wang Jin-pyng to run for a third time as a list legislator, the DPP didn't yield on this point. But why Hsinchu? Well, that's where Ker is originally from; he won several consecutive races there under the old SNTV system. Now that the electoral system has changed to single-member plurality, though, he's got a much tougher challenge.

I'm a bit surprised that Ker didn't manage to parachute into an easier district somewhere else. The fact that he's not only running in Hsinchu but also facing a challenge from the NPP suggests some significant opposition to him from elsewhere within his own party. But if he overcomes the odds and wins his race, he is going to owe Tsai Ing-wen very little, and he may have a political axe to grind with her or some other elements of the DPP for putting him in such a tough position. If he ends up as LY speaker, he could quite plausibly be a DPP version of Wang Jin-pyng during the Ma era: a powerful and independent-minded leader whose first priority is protecting his own interests, not those of the president or his party. Given how badly that turned out for Ma Ying-jeou and the KMT, this race could have an outsized impact on relations between Tsai and the DPP caucus in the LY after the election. It's worth watching closely. 

UPDATE 2015.12.30: Shortly after I wrote this, allegations of vote-buying were levied against the local KMT branch and its candidate, Cheng Cheng-chien, for holding a free public banquet in a local night market for KMT members and local residents. Pretty brazen, and stupid.  

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.