Ever notice that the shape of Taiwan looks suspiciously like a body-snatcher pod?!
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).
(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).
Huang Kuo-chang questions a DPP minister at the Legislative Yuan 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.
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.
Party System Realignments as Coordination Games
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):
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):
“The key feature of such a game is that there are multiple possible equilibria and that which one is chosen depends crucially on which one people expect to be chosen. Moreover, the more people there are who act in accord with a given equilibrium (e.g., that the two major parties are Labour and the Conservatives), the more it is in the interest of others to act in accord with that equilibrium. The consequence of these two features is that manipulating expectations - something that great leaders,
with their bully pulpits, are in a position to do - can powerfully affect the course of events, leading to fairly rapid and important changes in regime.”
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.
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.
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