Kharis Templeman
中文姓名:祁凱立
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Is the DPP a Favorite to Win in 2016?

1/15/2015

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Picture
DPP presidential candidate Tsai Ying-wen at a campaign rally in November 2011; she lost the 2012 presidential election to Ma Ying-jeou, 51.6-45.6%
The local elections on November 29th in Taiwan were a resounding defeat for the ruling KMT, and a major victory for the DPP. Taiwan’s main opposition party captured seven county and city executives from the KMT, raising their total from 6 to 13 of Taiwan’s local jurisdictions. DPP mayors now lead four of Taiwan’s six special municipalities: Taoyuan, Taichung, Tainan, and Kaohsiung. In addition, the nominally independent Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) received tacit DPP support for his successful bid for Taipei mayor, booting the KMT out of the mayor’s office there for the first time in 16 years. Only in New Taipei did the KMT manage to hang on, thanks in part to the personal popularity of the incumbent mayor Eric Chu (朱立倫).

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

It’s a little late for me to weigh in on the debate over why the KMT fared so badly—plenty of other people have done that already, and the impact is rapidly fading into the past as Taiwanese politics churns along. Instead, in this post I want to look forward and ask: what does the 2014 election tell us about future election outcomes in Taiwan, especially the 2016 presidential race?  
2014 Is Not 2016
The unquestioned assumption in most commentary in Taiwan is that the KMT’s recent electoral rout bodes poorly for its chances in the coming presidential and legislative elections, now tentatively set for January 2016. Some commentators have argued that the 2014 result indicates a fundamental electoral “breakthrough” for the DPP, rather than a temporary shift away from the KMT due to recent scandals and the unpopularity of President Ma, and that the DPP should be the favorite going into 2016.

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

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

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

Not necessarily, and the reason is turnout. In general, it's 10-15 percent higher in presidential elections than local ones. If these extra voters who show up at the polls in presidential elections disproportionately support the KMT, then the local results are going to give an underestimate of the KMT’s expected vote share in 2016. So it would be nice to know how much of the DPP's success is due to KMT-leaning voters staying home, versus the DPP winning more votes. To figure that out, we need to dig into the raw vote totals a little more.
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Was the DPP's Win a Result of Blue Voters Staying Home?
Let’s start with the basic numbers. Here are the turnout figures for 2012 and 2014:
  • 2012: 13,452,016 votes cast, or 74.4 percent of all eligible voters;
  • 2014: 12,512,135, or 67.6 percent.
So if turnout is on par with the last presidential election, there will be roughly a million more voters in 2016 than there were in 2014. If those voters look just like the 2014 electorate, then the local election offers a good estimate for 2016. But the more the non-voters in 2014 differ from the voters, the more we need to account for these differences to get an unbiased estimate.

Now, how about the partisan breakdown? Here's the vote totals for each party in 2012 (presidential election) and 2014 (county/city executives):
  • 2012: Tsai Ying-wen (DPP): 6,093,578
  • 2012: Ma Ying-jeou (KMT): 6,891,139
  • 2014: DPP candidates: 6,684,089*
  • 2014: KMT candidates: 4,990,667
(*I'm counting Ko Wen-je in Taipei as a DPP candidate here; more on that in a moment.)

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

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

2012-2014_elections_comparison.xlsx
File Size: 42 kb
File Type: xlsx
Download File

Adjusting for Races without a DPP Candidate
There's one caveat to this conclusion, and it's a big one: the result in Taipei was quite anomalous. Ko Wen-je in Taipei ran as an independent and deliberately avoided associating too closely with the DPP during the campaign, and the KMT's candidate Sean Lien (連勝文) was a particularly poor nominee. In 2016, the DPP is not going to be able to replicate what Ko did and carry Taipei by over 200,000 votes. Given Taipei's size, we're clearly overestimating the DPP's probable support if we count all the votes for Ko in 2014 as likely votes for the DPP in 2016. On the other hand, there were several other counties where the DPP didn't run a candidate; the party will undoubtedly add some votes in these places in 2016. Any inference about 2016 depends among other things on the net effect among these jurisdictions.

To get a better sense of the size of this effect, I took out the votes from the five "oddball" jurisdictions where the DPP did not run a candidate: Taipei, Hsinchu County, Hualien, Lienchiang, and Kinmen. The comparison of vote totals in the other, "normal" jurisdictions is below:
  • Tsai 2012 (minus oddballs): 5,321,816
  • DPP 2014 (minus oddballs): 5,830,106

So in the places where it ran a candidate, the DPP bested its 2012 vote total by over 500,000. That's especially impressive because there were double-digit declines in turnout from 2012 in New Taipei, Taoyuan, Tainan, and Kaohsiung. If the DPP candidate in 2016 can repeat the performance of the party's candidates in 2014, then 5.83 million votes is a conservative estimate of its vote total in these places in the next presidential election.

But what about the oddball places? Let's imagine that the DPP had run candidates in all these jurisdictions, and then assume that they performed as well on average as DPP candidates did elsewhere. In other words, assume that the increase in votes for the DPP in the oddball places would be proportional to the increase in the other, non-oddball places. That is:

DPP's net vote increase in normal jurisdictions, 2012 to 2014: 508,290
Total votes in normal jurisdictions, 2012: 11,246,356
Fraction increase: 0.045

Net increase in oddball jurisdictions, 2012 to 2014: X
Total votes in oddball jurisdictions, 2012: 2,107,949.

X is then 0.045*2,107,949, or 95,271 votes.

The Tsai campaign in 2012 won 771,762 votes in the oddball cases, so adding these up we get an estimate for 2014 of: 
771,762 + 95,271 = 867,033. 

Thus, 
Non-oddball 2014 vote total: 5,830,106
Oddball 2014 vote estimate: 867,033
Estimated 2014 DPP vote total if candidates ran everywhere: 6,697,139.

So, in a hypothetical scenario in which the DPP ran candidates everywhere, the party's vote total for 2014 would be 6,697,139. That is just under 200,000 votes short of what Ma Ying-jeou won but about 600,000 more than what Tsai won in 2012. It's also higher than any DPP presidential candidate has ever won in the past--Chen Shui-bian's vote total of 6,446,900 in 2004 is the previous high-water mark for the party. For a "local" election with a turnout rate well below the last presidential election, that number is eye-opening. It's a clear indication that the DPP didn't win just because pan-Blue voters stayed home while pan-Green voters all showed up; instead, if you accept the calculations above, the DPP in effect captured more votes than it has ever won before, in any election, presidential, legislative, or local. 

Generic Conditions Favor a DPP Win in 2016
Given that, the DPP should probably be viewed as a slight favorite to win the presidency in 2016 even under generic conditions--two high-profile, appealing candidates, a neutral economic environment, moderate ideological position-taking, and the absence of serious third-party challengers. Those are big "ifs": a lot can change over the next year. But it seems more likely that they will change for the worse rather than for the better for the KMT. 

For one, while the DPP seems set to nominate Tsai Ying-wen again, the KMT does not have any obvious presidential contender waiting in the wings beyond Eric Chu. If he decides not to run, whoever the KMT nominee is will start at a serious disadvantage in name recognition and personal appeal. And if Chu does decide to run, he will probably need to put considerable distance between himself and the incumbent president in order to have a serious shot at winning. President Ma's approval ratings, and those of the Executive Yuan, have been consistently under 20 percent for most of his second term, giving the DPP the opportunity to frame the election as an anti-Ma vote as much as a pro-DPP one. 

So, bottom line: unless there are major surprises over the next year, the 2014 election results suggest that Taiwan's next president will likely be from the DPP. For a party that has itself been on the receiving end of several electoral drubbings over the last decade, it's a remarkable political recovery.
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Ma vs Wang, Lesson 2:  The KMT legislative caucus is Ma Ying-jeou's primary opponent

9/21/2014

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For the previous posts in this series, see here and here.
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Readying for battle: pan-Green and pan-Blue legislators wave competing signs before the opening of the legislative session, July 8, 2010.
Legislative Yuan Politics: Tyranny of the Minority?
For the last year, the fight over the Cross-Strait Services in Trade Agreement (CSSTA, or Fu-Mao for short) has taken center stage in Taiwanese politics. Although Fu-Mao has been the top policy priority of the Ma administration since it was signed June 21, 2013, it remains under review by the Legislative Yuan. Improving the prospects for Fu-Mao passage was probably the primary motivation behind the attempt to expel Legislative Yuan Speaker Wang Jin-pyng from the KMT. The opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and its nominal ally, the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU), devoted much of their time working to slow the review process in the legislature, from initiating a physical confrontation in the LY over how the agreement would be reviewed, to demonstrations in hearings, to using parliamentary tricks to upset committee sessions. By the time Chang Ching-chung (張慶忠), the convener of the Internal Administration Committee, unilaterally announced that Fu-Mao had passed the committee in the now-infamous "30-second review" on March 18, 2014, the agreement had already languished for nine months.

The apparent success of the pan-Green parties in blocking Fu-Mao, despite not holding anything close to a majority in the legislature (the DPP and TSU together have only 43 of 113 seats, or 38%), suggests at first glance that a highly motivated minority can exercise de facto veto power over all legislative business. How you feel about that probably depends on your view about cross-Strait trade agreements: -pan-Blue types (i.e. pro-KMT) tend to think of this as a "tyranny of the minority" and a terrible affront to the democratic principle of majority rule, while pan-Green types like to characterize it as a heroic, nation-saving stand in the face of a ruling party captured by Chinese interests. But if we step away from the particular issue of Fu-Mao, and think about what's best for Taiwan's democracy in the abstract, allowing minority parties an effective veto over anything they don't like is troubling. 

Imagine if the partisan roles were reversed. In fact, let's take a DPP dream scenario: say, a hypothetical President Tsai Ing-wen taking office in 2016, and enjoying a newly elected pan-Green majority in the legislature, attempts to win legislative approval for a special budget to purchase a new arms package just approved by the U.S. Then imagine the opposition pan-Blue parties, despite controlling only a minority of the seats, effectively blocking this proposal, as they did several times (with a majority) during the Chen Shui-bian administration? If you're a pan-Green supporter, you're very quickly going to change your tune about minority party rights and heroic boycotts and blockades, no?  So, if minority parties really are able to exercise a de facto veto in the legislature, that does not bode well for coherent policy change in a place whose political elites are highly polarized over anything to do with cross-Strait relations. You're effectively stuck with the status quo.
PictureKMT legislators celebrate the passage of the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) in the Legislature, August 16, 2010.
Minority Party Obstruction Requires Majority Party Dissent
Now, let me strike a more optimistic note: I do not actually think the opposition parties have an effective veto over everything in the LY. On the contrary, in President Ma's first term, the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, which created the foundation for subsequent cross-Strait agreements like Fu-Mao and was also fiercely opposed by the DPP and TSU, passed the legislature only six weeks after it was signed. 

What the approval of ECFA indicates to me is that a president can get his priorities passed by the LY, even in the face of opposition party boycotts and blockades, if two conditions hold: (1) his party has a working majority, and (2) his own party's legislators are willing to vote the party line. What Ma is missing right now on Fu-Mao is the second: support from KMT legislators. In other words, the key disagreement over Fu-Mao right now is within the KMT, not between the Ma administration and the DPP or Speaker Wang.

This claim is not obvious, and it's more of a working hypothesis than a firm conclusion. But from conversations with political insiders and a close reading of actions in the LY, I'm increasingly convinced there was, even a year ago, significant opposition in the KMT's legislative caucus to Fu-Mao--enough opposition, in fact, that the agreement would probably have been rejected if the vote were secret. 

Why is the KMT, rather than the obstructionist tactics of the DPP, key to explaining the failure of the legislature to approve Fu-Mao? Because those tactics are only effective if the majority party isn't well-organized or committed to counter them. For instance, take the primary weapon the opposition uses: blockading the speaker's podium (霸佔主席台), which physically prevents Speaker Wang from gaveling in the legislative session (which normally happens every Tuesday and Thursday at 9am when the legislature is in session). This action is, roughly speaking, the Taiwanese version of a filibuster. Without a formal commencement of the legislative session, no LY business can be conducted, and actions such as the review of Fu-Mao cannot commence.

So what's to prevent the minority parties in the legislature from doing this all the time? The majority party tactic that's been used in recent years is to have a physical confrontation in the legislative chamber with blockading opposition legislators. As crazy as this might sound to the uninitiated, the majority party can clear a path to the podium by rallying all of its members to the LY floor and shoving the opposition out of the way in what looks like a rugby scrum. The video shown here (also see the photo at left) is an example of a successful effort.

It's easy to get so distracted by all the chaos and the spectacle of elected legislators throwing things at one another that you miss the critical outcome of this scrum: Speaker Wang gavels in the session to begin the second reading of ECFA. (One can just make him out at the back of the crowd, waiting for a path to clear. The video shows more of the sequence.) The KMT caucus then votes down a series of motions by the DPP to stall or to make ECFA subject to an item-by-item review. 
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A phalanx of KMT legislators work to force DPP members out of the speaker's podium and end the minority blockade of the legislative session. Speaker Wang Jin-pyng subsequently gaveled in the session, and the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement proceeded to the second reading, July 8, 2010.
Eventually, Speaker Wang worked out a procedural compromise in which the opposition DPP was allowed to offer amendments to each ECFA article, and the KMT then voted them all down, before the full bill was passed on August 17. This worked out okay for everyone: the DPP got a face-saving way to yield to the KMT majority, which was going to pass the bill one way or another; the KMT caucus got to avoid more fights on the floor; President Ma got ECFA approved; and Wang got to play peacemaker. 

If you think about it a bit, these kinds of physical confrontations shouldn't happen very often. They impose a cost on everyone: they attract a lot of negative media attention to the institution (including from CCTV in China!), people get hurt, etc. So there's an incentive for all sides to work out a compromise that precludes a public confrontation on the floor. The reason this doesn't happen all the time, I would guess, is uncertainty: neither party knows just how credible any given threat is by the KMT to initiate a confrontation in the LY and end a blockade. In the ECFA case, the July 8 showdown ended any uncertainty that the KMT would be able to mobilize its caucus to defend the speaker and end the blockade of the podium--in other words, that almost all KMT legislators supported ECFA and were willing to do whatever it took to get it passed. Once that became common knowledge, the DPP had only symbolic options left, like walking out of the legislative session in protest and getting an article-by-article vote it knew it would lose.
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Second Term Blues: President Ma's approval rating, June 2008-June 2013
Between a Rock and a Hard Place (進退兩難): For KMT Legislators, Fu-Mao is not ECFA
So that brings us back to Fu-Mao, the Cross-Strait Services in Trade Agreement (CSSTA). If the KMT managed to get ECFA through the legislature in six weeks in 2010, then why wasn't it able to do the same for Fu-Mao in 2013? Nothing fundamental has changed in the legislature: the KMT lost some seats in the last election, but the party still has a significant majority (64/113, or 57%), even discounting the four additional legislators from the People First Party and Non-Partisan Solidarity Union who in general have voted with the KMT. The DPP and TSU are still quite solidly in the minority.

What has changed is public opinion, both toward President Ma and cross-Strait trade relations. When ECFA was signed in June 2010, Ma's public approval rating was about 47%--not great, but reasonably high given that Taiwan's economy was recovering from a severe recession that began almost as soon as he came into office.  Public support for ECFA was also positive: a TVBS survey in May 2010 found 41% of respondents approved of signing the agreement, while 34% disapproved.

By contrast, shortly after Fu-Mao was signed in June 2013, TVBS found public opinion running against the agreement, 47-30%, and Ma's approval rating at only 13%, with an astounding 73% of respondents disapproving of his performance, an all-time high. This was before any of the events of the subsequent year, including the Ma-Wang fight and the Sunflower Movement.

Given these polling numbers, it's not hard to see why support for Fu-Mao in the KMT caucus might have been a lot weaker than the party elites wanted to admit. Not only did legislators have to worry about all the criticism coming from industry groups and constituents within their districts. They also had to worry about the electoral consequences of taking a public stand in favor of an unpopular trade agreement with China, while going out on a limb for an even more unpopular president who's spent most of his time in office keeping them at arm's length. But Ma is still the party chairman, and has repeatedly indicated he's willing to discipline KMT members who don't toe the party line on this issue. That's the definition of being stuck between a rock and a hard place (進退兩難). 

So then the DPP comes along and blocks the speaker's podium, and dissenting KMT members have an escape hatch: publicly say nothing so as not to violate party dictates, but privately avoid being anywhere near the legislature when it comes time for a show of force to get the DPP to stand down. It's not a coincidence that there was another major showdown at the speaker's podium on June 25, 2013, shortly after Fu-Mao was signed on June 21. This one did not go so well for the KMT, or at least for Ma's allies: after six hours of altercations, the parties agreed to an extensive item-by-item review of Fu-Mao, against the wishes of the Ma administration. Buried in the news reports of this confrontation are two revealing differences with ECFA. First, the KMT leadership itself started the standoff by ordering legislators to try to secure the speaker's podium at 6:30am, to preempt pan-Green legislators who were planning to do the same. Second, they failed, in part because there were many fewer KMT legislators present than in 2010--note the failure to block off the back door. I'm willing to bet there are a few KMT members who were secretly thrilled with this outcome, because it got them off the hook from having to support an unpopular agreement or else face party discipline.
PictureDPP legislators block access to the voting box in the legislature, preventing a vote on Control Yuan nominees, July 4, 2014
I should reiterate that a lot of this explanation is informed speculation on my part. But even if I've got some of the details wrong, the fact remains that KMT legislators have been quite willing recently to criticize and vote against the party leadership on many different issues, especially if the votes are not public. The most striking instance of this kind of mass defection from the President's camp came just a couple of months ago over Control Yuan nominees. There was a rather bitter dispute between Ma and his allies in the LY, on one side, and what appeared to be the opposition DPP again, on the other, over how Control Yuan nominees would be voted on. Ma wanted to impose a public vote, because he was (rightly) worried that many of his nominees would go down to defeat otherwise. The pan-Greens instead demanded a secret vote. In the end, the DPP and TSU physically blocked access to the ballot boxes set up in the LY chambers, and then occupied the speaker's podium again; this strategy succeeded in forcing the vote to be carried out individually with private ballots, without the "group voting" that Ma's allies had initially devised to keep KMT members in line. And lo and behold, 11 of the 29 Control Yuan nominees were voted down--an outcome that could only have happened with at least eight "no" votes from KMT members. 

Politics in the Legislature: Messy, but Responsive to Public Opinion
Let me sum up what is now a rather long post. I've argued that there are some important strategic reasons behind all the spectacle of fights and occupations in the legislature:
  • The Taiwanese legislature features a limited minority veto;
  • When the majority party is cohesive and disciplined, minorities can't generally stop things they oppose;
  • But when there's dissent within the majority party, minority party obstruction becomes highly effective.
Thus, the Ma administration has been in a bind much of his second term: he wants to get legislative approval for Fu-Mao and other policy priorities, but these are unpopular, and so is he. And he's been unable to threaten or cajole KMT legislators into doing what it takes to overcome DPP opposition. What we've seen play out over the last year and more is at heart a consequence of Ma running up against his limited authority over the LY, even though he's the chairman of the majority party there. 

If you buy this argument, then the implication for democracy in Taiwan is a lot better than I implied in the last post: minorities in the LY don't generally exercise vetoes over everything they don't like, and majority parties, especially when they have public opinion on their side, can indeed get controversial things passed. It's only when public opinion is running strongly against something the executive wants that it's likely to stall in the legislature. And if you think elected representative parliaments should be broadly responsive to changing public opinion, then that's probably a good thing.

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Ma vs Wang, Lesson 1: The Legislative Yuan matters more than ever for policy-making in Taiwan

9/19/2014

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For the intro post in this series, see here.
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The old days of executive dominance: premier Hau Pei-tsun orders Chen Shui-bian, then a DPP legislator, back to his seat in the Legislative Yuan, Oct. 21, 1992.
For most of Taiwan's postwar history, policy-making was highly centralized in the Executive Yuan and the KMT itself. The Legislative Yuan, by contrast, was mostly a talking shop that rubber-stamped government budgets and initiatives. That began to change with democratization, but it's been a slow process. Even today, the annual budget proposal is drafted by the executive, and the legislature is prevented from adding new spending--the only way for legislators to affect this process directly is to cut funding, or freeze funds once they've been appropriated.

Nevertheless, the legislature has steadily accumulated authority at the expense of executive ministries over the last two decades. The ability of opposition party legislators to make life tough for executive branch officials became especially apparent in the later years of the Chen Shui-bian administration, when a pan-Blue (KMT-PFP) alliance held a relatively unified majority of the seats in the LY. Legislative committee inquisitions of ministers were common, key bureaus had budgets cut or frozen for transparently partisan reasons, and much of the government's proposed legislation (with key exceptions) was blocked. 

At the time, the standoff between the two branches appeared due almost entirely to the intensely partisan atmosphere that prevailed from 2004-2008. Thus, when Ma Ying-jeou won the 2008 election and the KMT won over 3/4 of the seats in the LY, most observers expected executive-legislative relations to become much more cordial and cooperative again. And for Ma's first term, they seemed to be improved, although even then there were complaints about LY "inefficiency" at passing high-priority legislation.

But legislative independence has reemerged with a vengeance in Ma's second term, even though the KMT remains the majority party there. What is so striking about the events of the last year and more is that even in a period of "unified" party control of both branches, the LY has prevented a quick passage of the president's top policy priority--the CSSTA--and may have killed it for good. That is not an outcome that I would have predicted in 2012, when Ma was re-elected. 

From a systemic perspective, what's potentially more troubling is that the current situation is about the best a governing party in Taiwan could ever hope for: the KMT controls the presidency and a majority in the legislature, and the president is the chairman of the party. The unity of purpose across the branches should be highest in this scenario. If a president can't get his agenda approved by the legislature under these circumstances, when can he?
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Ma vs Wang, One Year Later

9/19/2014

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Picture
Legislative Yuan Speaker Wang Jin-pyng and President Ma Ying-jeou, playing nice for the cameras
Although it passed mostly unnoted in the Taiwanese media, last week marked the one-year anniversary of the (failed) attempt by President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) to expel Legislative Yuan Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) from the KMT. It has also been about a year since I started blogging regularly on Taiwanese politics, so the Ma-Wang fight featured prominently in my first posts.  At the time, I hadn’t paid much attention to intra-KMT politics or executive-legislative relations, and I quickly realized there was a lot I didn't understand. My working assumption had always been that because the KMT controlled a comfortable majority in the legislature, and President Ma was the chairman of the KMT, he could probably get most of what he wanted approved there. 

The sudden attempt to purge Speaker Wang suggested that executive-legislative policy-making was more complicated, and more interesting, than I had supposed. And the slow, foot-dragging review of the Cross-Strait Services in Trade Agreement (CSSTA) (兩岸服務貿易協議) --"Fu-Mao" for short--in the legislature put the lie to the idea that President Ma could ultimately wield control over the KMT to get executive priorities passed.  It eventually became clear that these two events were probably linked: that Ma's strike against Wang was motivated at least in part by his frustration with the slow pace of action on the CSSTA in the legislature. 

All this happened well before a procedural dispute sparked the student protest and occupation of the legislature that became known as the Sunflower Movement. Thus, while the student protests were unexpected and dramatic, and attracted a huge amount of foreign and domestic media attention, their main political achievement so far is to have reinforced the pre-existing stalemate between the legislature and the executive. The focus on the light and heat generated by the Sunflower Movement has, I think, obscured this fact: the legislature as an institution is a formidable and powerful opponent of the executive. 
Picture
Ma and Wang at the KMT party congress, September 15, 2014.
The narrative of the Ma administration is that the legislature is dysfunctional, and that the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is entirely to blame for the ruling party's troubles. At the KMT's party congress  this past week, for instance, President Ma criticized the DPP for its "endless" obstructionism and "abuse" of minority power. 

If the main opposition party in the legislature really does have the ability to block everything it doesn't like, then that is indeed worrisome for Taiwan's democracy. But it's not as simple as that. The DPP, for all its success in harassing cabinet officials and stalling government initiatives, is not able to exercise an effective veto over legislation as long as the KMT itself is unified. Thus, I think the fundamental political problem for Ma lies not with the opposition but within the KMT itself. 
In posts over the next few days, I'm going to elaborate on this claim, along with some thoughts on what it means for Taiwan's democracy. In particular, I think the events of the last year have demonstrated four things:
  1. The Legislative Yuan matters more than ever for policy-making.
  2. The KMT legislative caucus is the primary obstacle to presidential priorities--not the DPP, the Cross-Party Negotiation Committee, or Wang Jin-pyng.
  3. President Ma thought removing Wang Jin-pyng would solve his problems with the legislature. It won't.
  4. The Ma administration doesn't understand the politics of the legislature very well.

Separate posts will follow.
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    About Me

    I am a political scientist with research interests in democratization, elections and election management, parties and party system development, one-party dominance, and the links between domestic politics and external security issues. My regional expertise is in East Asia, with special focus on Taiwan.

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