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. 

On December 20, amid shouting, shoving, fistfights, and broken furniture, Taiwan’s opposition-controlled legislature passed by a show of hands three controversial bills that threaten to kneecap its government. The first raised the threshold to recall elected officials. The second required the Constitutional Court to have a 2/3 quorum to hear constitutional cases and imposed a supermajority threshold to invalidate a law. And the third shifted the central-local revenue-sharing formula to give local governments (mostly KMT-run) 40 percent of all government revenues, up from 25 percent, at the expense of the DPP-run central government.
​
Four days later, the same opposition majority in the legislature voted down all seven of President Lai’s nominees to the Constitutional Court, leaving it with only eight justices and unable to meet the new quorum requirement for hearing a case. It is now effectively paralyzed. The DPP government has nevertheless requested that the court meet and rule anyway on whether the amendments to the Constitutional Court Act are themselves unconstitutional. This increasingly destructive partisan political conflict has put Taiwan on the brink of a constitutional crisis with no obvious way to resolve it. 

This confrontation is also taking place in a democracy that Freedom House last year ranked as the second-best in Asia, behind only Japan, and significantly above the United States and most of Europe. Taiwan's political system has proven remarkably resilient to PRC influence operations over many years, and it has a capable and effective state and vibrant economy despite its diplomatic isolation. So why is it facing a political crisis now?

​The simplest answer is divided government. For the first time in 16 years (and only the second time in its democratic history), Taiwan's legislative and executive branches are controlled by different parties: the Chinese Nationalist Party or Kuomintang (KMT) and Taiwan People's Party (TPP) together hold a majority in the Legislative Yuan, and they are locked in a fierce power struggle with the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government.  

This conflict was not inevitable. In the January 2024 presidential and legislative elections, the DPP's Lai Ching-te (賴清德) won the presidential election but with only 40% of the vote, and the DPP lost its majority in the legislature. The KMT ended up with 52 seats (plus two blue-leaning independents), the DPP won 51, and presidential candidate Ko Wen-je's (柯文哲) centrist TPP won eight (all via the party list vote). That left no party with a majority and made the TPP the crucial swing voting bloc in the LY. In theory, the TPP could have exploited that leverage to extract significant concessions from the ruling DPP -- on policy, legislative leadership, or cabinet positions. But instead, negotiations between the DPP and TPP went nowhere, and President Lai missed his chance to head off the last year of partisan warfare.   

The formation of battle lines first became apparent on February 1, when the new legislature was seated. Its first order of business was to elect a speaker and deputy speaker. Curiously, the TPP  ultimately decided not to support either of the major party nominees -- the party's eight legislators voted for TPP member Huang Shan-shan (黃珊珊) in the first round, and abstained in the second.  As a result, the KMT's Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) won the speaker's race, and KMT legislator Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) was elected as his deputy. Despite providing crucial help to the KMT, the TPP did not manage to win even the deputy speaker as the price for their support. Nor did they strike a deal with the DPP, either, although that should have secured at least one of the leadership positions for the party. Given that the TPP held the crucial votes that could have denied control of the legislature to either major party, this outcome seems like a major missed opportunity for both them and the DPP. 

I've heard competing explanations for this bargaining failure. One story is that the refusal came from the DPP side -- ruling party legislators were engaged in quiet conversations with the TPP about a possible power-sharing deal, but Lai Ching-te intervened to stop the negotiations. Reporting at the time suggested that the TPP's price for cooperation in the run-up to February 1 was for the DPP to support Huang Shan-shan for speaker -- a price the DPP was apparently not willing to pay, but which in hindsight they probably should have. That interpretation is also consistent with the public comments offered by party caucus whip Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘) that "A DPP-TPP partnership is only possible if the TPP voluntarily comes to us."​So maybe this was a strategic mistake by the DPP caucus (and ultimately, Lai himself), and they are suffering the consequences. 

But another possibility is that the TPP was just never seriously interested in cooperating with the DPP no matter what they offered -- even before  Ko Wen-je's detention in a corruption investigation several months later turbocharged the TPP's animosity toward the DPP government. Although the KMT-TPP negotiations for a joint presidential ticket broke down in spectacular public fashion in November 2023, the two parties did still enter into a pre-election coalition for the legislative races and even campaigned together, so perhaps TPP leaders had already made up their minds to team up with the KMT after the elections, too, and there really was no chance the DPP could have enticed them to defect.  

Whatever the reason, ever since the new legislature was seated on February 1, the TPP has consistently chosen to act as the KMT's junior partner and supported the opposition party's confrontational approach to the DPP government. And as the partisan divide has hardened, it has also transformed into an inter-branch conflict between the KMT-TPP majority in the legislature and the DPP in the executive. The partisan maneuvering that has followed has escalated over the last year to a level of open political warfare that is posing a severe test for Taiwan's democratic institutions. And it is a test they are failing.

 I recently had the privilege of reading and reviewing for China Quarterly a massive new volume on the role of international human rights conventions and their importance for Taiwan.

The editors are all major figures in their own right. Jerome Cohen is legendary for taking up the study of Chinese legal systems during the 1950s and 60s, when nobody else thought there was much point to it, and he was a professor to both Annette Lu and Ma Ying-jeou at Harvard in the 1970s. His opening chapter recounts some of his personal history pushing back against Taiwan's martial-law-era criminal justice system, and there are some eye-opening anecdotes in there. I did not know, for instance, that Cohen was instrumental in bringing a civil lawsuit in a Taiwanese court against the the killers of Henry Liu, and that he worked with future Kaohsiung mayor and DPP presidential candidate Frank Hsieh 謝長廷 to bring pressure on the KMT regime through its own court system.

William Alford and Chang-fa Lo are no slouches, either; Alford is a vice dean and director of East Asian Legal Studies at Harvard. Chang-fa Lo 羅昌發 was Dean of National Taiwan University Law School and served as a justice of the ROC Council of Grand Justices, Taiwan's constitutional court, from 2011-2019 (as a Ma Ying-jeou appointee). In 2020 he was appointed Taiwan's representative to the World Trade Organization by Tsai Ing-wen. So during his years of public service he has managed to receive support from both the blue and green camps.

Between them, they have assembled an extremely impressive group of legal scholars and practitioners to contribute 37 chapters on many aspects of human rights law in Taiwan. The authors are also a welcome mix of Taiwan- and overseas-based experts. This kind of international, English-language collaboration is hard to pull off, but the payoff comes from having Taiwanese voices featured prominently throughout the volume and a truly original set of sources and scholarship on this topic.  

***

I note in my review several things that make Taiwan's human rights regime unusual.

First, because of its diplomatic isolation, Taiwan isn't party to the key UN human rights conventions and treaties, but despite (because?) of that isolation, international law has been especially influential in the transformation of the human rights regime. For instance, in 2009 (when the KMT was the ruling party), the Legislative Yuan adopted into domestic law the two major human rights covenants, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), and empowered Taiwan's courts to nullify other legal statutes inconsistent with provisions in the two treaties. Several chapters also focus on the efforts to turn the Control Yuan into a human rights commission or ombudsman that would give it a role more in line with international practices in other liberal democracies.

Second, Taiwan's legal system still rests on the foundations of the 1947 Republic of China constitution. In a rather odd twist, the protections for human rights enshrined there were actually quite advanced for its time, and that has helped to strengthen civil liberties in the democratic era. In particular, the survival of the ROC constitutional framework gave the constitutional court an outsized role in shaping the pace and direction of human rights reforms: in the 1990s, the court began to breathe life into constitutional aspirations that went mostly unfulfilled during the pre-democratic era and set legal practices and protections on a more liberal trajectory.

Third, Taiwan's current legal system is a remarkable mix of at least three very different traditions:  Chinese Confucianism; European continental law (much of that itself first refracted through Japanese practice before coming to the ROC, or directly to Taiwan during colonial rule); and Anglo-American practices, most notably in the applications of US First Amendment jurisprudence to libel and free-speech cases. It is a truly unique concoction of influences, and as a result it is fascinating to watch debates over legal reforms play out there now.  

I came away from this book convinced that in addition to the economic and political "miracles" that get most of the attention in scholarship on Taiwan's ROC-era transformation, there is also a human rights miracle that deserves separate consideration. Taiwan and Human Rights will be an important reference for anyone interested in Taiwan's evolution from a serial violator of human rights to one of its most enthusiastic proponents. ​

The Hoover Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region will host a virtual event tomorrow (register at the link), Tuesday, December 8 at 4pm, the Dynamics of Democracy in Taiwan: The Ma Ying-jeou Era.This event will cover some of the findings from a recent new book that I have co-edited with Yun-han Chu and Larry Diamond. We're fortunate to have three of the contributors to the book able to join us for the discussion. They are: 

Szu-yin Ho, Professor of Strategic and International Affairs at Tamkang University, Danshui, Taiwan, and the former  deputy secretary-general of the National Security Council during the Ma Ying-jeou presidency. He'll be speaking about the legacies of President Ma's cross-Strait policies. 

Austin Horng-en Wang, Assistant Professor of Political Science at UNLV. He'll provide some remarks about the emergence of Tsai Ing-wen as the unquestioned leader of the DPP during the Ma era. 

Shih-hao Huang, Post-Doctoral Fellow in political science at National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan. He'll present data that show the challenges the Ma administration had getting priority legislation approved by the Taiwan's Legislative Yuan, despite enjoying a large KMT majority there for both his terms. He will also compare legislative success rates under Ma to the Tsai Ing-wen era, and reflect a bit on what the differences can tell us about executive-legislative relations in Taiwan. 

For more on the book, and a link to the first chapter, see this previous blog post. 

This will be the last event of the calendar year for PTIP. Keep an eye out for announcements about our 2021 activities, coming soon. 

Finally, on a personal note, this event is my first as the Program Manger of the Hoover Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific. After being out of that role for over a year, as of November 1 I've stepped back in to take over the day-to-day management of the current incarnation of the Taiwan program at its new home at the Hoover Institution. Many thanks to Glenn Tiffert for his great stewardship of PTIP over the past year while juggling many other responsibilities--including, not coincidentally, the China Global Sharp Power project.    

It's alive! This book volume on Taiwan politics during the Ma Ying-jeou years (2008-2016), which I've edited with Chu Yun-han and Larry Diamond, just arrived in the mail from Lynne Rienner Publishers this weekend.

This is our attempt at a deep dive into various aspects of Ma-era politics, including party politics and elections, political institutions and governance challenges, trends in public opinion and democratic values, civil society and social movements, and cross-Strait and US-Taiwan-PRC relations. This look at the Ma years parallels somewhat our earlier book on the Chen Shui-bian era.

We were fortunate to be able to assemble a great group of contributors for this book--about half based in Taiwan and half abroad--who offer a variety of perspectives on the politics of the Ma years. The scholarship here draws on years of conferences, papers, and conversations that started even before President Ma left office, including with some of the key participants in and outside of the Ma administration. (Chapter 15, for instance, is by Szu-yin Ho, who served for two years as deputy Secretary-General of Ma's National Security Council.) This sort of cross-national collaboration is less common than it should be (in part because it's logistically hard to pull off!), but I am convinced the final product is much stronger for it.  

Among the many great contributions here, let me especially highlight three that provide original, provocative answers to important questions about the Ma era:

• In Chapter 3, Austin Wang explains how Tsai Ing-wen emerged from obscurity as unrivaled leader of the DPP during its years in opposition, despite having never previously held elected office;
• In Chapter 4, Nathan Batto shows how President Ma's recurrent troubles with the legislature had more to do with deep divides within the ruling KMT than they did with the obstructionist tactics of the opposition DPP and with Ma's party rival, Speaker Wang Jin-pyng;
• In Chapter 7, Isaac Shih-hao Huang and Shing-yuan Sheng demonstrate that having a majority in the Legislative Yuan does not mean a party has complete control over the Legislative Yuan, and that the legislature's decentralized law-making process makes it challenging for the executive branch to get high-priority legislation approved, whether or not the president's party holds a majority. 

For more thoughts on those issues and a broader overview of the book, check out the introductory chapter, which is available ungated from the publisher's website. 

If Tsai Ing-wen is superstitious, she should be worried: second term presidents in Taiwan appear to be cursed. Much like President Tsai, her predecessor Ma Ying-jeou started his second term on a confident and triumphant note. But over the next four years, he faced a relentless series of political crises, including an intraparty power struggle with Legislative Yuan Speaker Wang Jin-pyng, massive protests against the death of a military conscript and construction of a nuclear power plant, and of course the Sunflower Movement occupation of the legislature, which effectively halted cross-Strait rapprochement with Beijing. President Ma’s approval ratings bottomed out at record lows, and he stepped down in 2016 on the heels of a sweeping electoral defeat of the ruling Kuomintang (KMT), ultimately having accomplished little in his last years in office.

Somehow, Chen Shui-bian’s second term was even worse. The controversy around his re-election victory in 2004 robbed him of whatever political momentum he might have enjoyed, and he spent most of his remaining tenure fending off vicious partisan attacks, anti-corruption accusations in the press, massive street rallies by his opponents, and impeachment attempts in the legislature. In his attempt to keep core pro-independence supporters on his side, President Chen pursued a brash symbolic agenda that deliberately provoked the pan-Blue opposition, infuriated Beijing, alienated even potential allies in Washington, and left him politically isolated. In the 2008 elections, his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) paid a steep electoral price, and after his term was finally over, Chen ended up in handcuffs: the corruption accusations turned out to be true, and he was sentenced to a long prison term.

The rest of this piece continues at Taiwan Insight.

​One of the more interesting developments in Taiwan's 2016 general election was the rise of so-called  "Third Force" parties--completely new entrants into the political system, rather than break-aways from the KMT or the DPP.  While some of the media commentary got a bit carried away about the significance of these new parties, the founding of one, the New Power Party (NPP), did pose a serious threat to the DPP's chances of winning a majority in the legislature. As an offshoot of the Sunflower Movement, the NPP positioned its message in a way calculated to appeal to pan-green voters, and it recruited high-profile candidates to run in district races, not just the party list. These district candidates had the potential to split the pan-green vote in what everyone expected would be a very anti-KMT year, and in a worst-case scenario for their side, help the KMT hold on to their legislative majority. 

In the end, a pan-green split didn't happen. A key reason is that the DPP headed off the threat early: the party formed a kind of pre-electoral coalition by yielding 11 districts to the NPP and other non-DPP candidates in exchange for their support not to run against DPP candidates elsewhere. And the districts that the DPP yielded were, with one exception, far past the critical 57th seat needed to deliver a legislative majority. It turned out to be a good deal for the DPP, which won 68 seats overall. It also, more surprisingly, turned out well for the NPP, which won all three district seats and five overall and became the third largest party in the LY. 

The NPP Surprise
My own expectation going into the election was that the NPP candidates would perform worse, on average, than a generic DPP challenger. (In fact, if you read that linked post closely, I was even more specific: 2-4 points worse, on average.) The rationale was pretty simple: Freddy Lim, Hung Tzu-yung, and Huang Kuo-chang were already household names, but their close association with the Sunflower Movement, and the acerbic rhetoric of Huang, especially, suggested they would be fairly polarizing as candidates. And in the traditionally blue-leaning districts of Taipei 5 (Lim) and New Taipei 12 (Huang), I thought they would turn off more voters than they attracted with that approach. 

So what actually happened? In the graph above, I've plotted the vote share of each DPP and DPP-endorsed district candidate against Tsai Ing-wen's share of the presidential vote in the same district. DPP incumbents are represented by solid dots; challengers (i.e. non-incumbents) by hollow ones; NPP candidates by hollow squares, and other non-DPP candidates by hollow triangles. (A hearty thank you to Frozen Garlic for doing the yeoman's work of sorting the presidential race vote totals by LY district and making these data publicly available.)

Thoughts on this below the break. 

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. 

Apologies for the lack of posts after the election--I'm still catching up with my day job after an exciting and fruitful trip to Taiwan. If you're jonesing for some election reactions, plenty of other people have already weighed in on what happened and what the results mean. (Here's one long list.) We'll no doubt be analyzing and talking about the results of these elections for the next several years, but I'll try to write some reflections on the actual results over the next few weeks, in addition to some thoughts on developments in the Legislative Yuan and appointments to President-elect Tsai's incoming government.

In the interim, here are a couple links. I had the opportunity to give some initial thoughts at an event in Taipei the day after the elections; here is the video from that roundtable, sponsored by Ketagalan Media.

We also held an event at Stanford last Tuesday at which Larry Diamond and I had a bit more time to reflect on the elections, the health of Taiwan's democracy, and what's likely to come next; slides and video from that seminar can be found at the CDDRL ​event page. 

I'll repeat my main take-away from both those events: this was a (mostly) encouraging demonstration of  Taiwan's democratic process, whatever your ideological or partisan predilections might be.

President-elect Tsai Ing-wen will have a large DPP majority in the legislature, and the prospects for reform of aspects of the legislative process are that much better for it. The impressive victories of the New Power Party in its district races are also an encouraging sign: the NPP grew out of the student-led protests of 2014, and their success indicates that much of that opposition to the Ma administration has been channeled into the electoral and now the legislative process rather than remaining in the streets. And, this bears repeating, Taiwan's elections management remains a model of efficiency, accuracy, and probity--I never fail to be impressed at how smoothly the voting, counting, and reporting of the results takes place. I wish elections in the United States were even half as well run.    

On the less positive side, turnout was way down--66.2%, below even the 2014 local elections. And there's that pesky matter of a nearly four-month gap between the seating of the new legislature on February 1 and the inauguration of the new president on May 20, which is creating a real constitutional challenge. That badly needs to be fixed in this next term, perhaps by Tsai offering to shorten her own term as a one-off concession in a larger package of reforms. 

Finally, now that the new Legislative Yuan has been formally sworn in, it's important to note that Tsai has just secured the election of a new DPP speaker, Su Jia-chyuan (蘇嘉全), who's a close personal ally--an outcome that required the incumbent DPP caucus leader, Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘), to relinquish his claim on the position. In that vote, no DPP members defected from the party, and the NPP caucus also voted in Su's favor. That's an auspicious start to what is going to be a fascinating period in legislative politics in Taiwan.