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

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

​
This behavior is puzzling! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I don't think this is actually true.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Except it wasn't! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

​In the 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.