Some of the sharper commentary on the upcoming election has noted how livelihood issues, such as a growing wealth gap, soaring housing prices, and stubbornly high youth unemployment rate, are a big part of the reason public opinion has swung so dramatically against the KMT over the last two years, rather than cross-Strait relations. If I can hammer one thing home to outside observers about this election, it's that domestic issues, rather than cross-Strait relations, are what will decide this coming election. The outcome is not really a referendum on Taiwan's relationship with China, or an indication of a sudden surge in Taiwanese nationalism, but instead reflects deep concerns with "bread and butter" issues.  

So what do I mean by bread and butter issues? Well, the commentary linked above is focused mostly on the concerns about income and wealth distribution that have been salient for a while and have gotten a lot of press in recent years. But in addition, there's something much more recent and fundamental working against the KMT right now: the economy is just not doing very well. Here's a sample of the (English-language) economic news reports coming out of Taiwan over the last few months: 

Taiwan is in a recession, and it's China's fault -- Forbes (December 1)
Weaker growth exposes downsides of China ties -- The Economist (November 14)
Industrial production falls 15% -- Taipei Times (November 20)
Unpaid leave hits 3-year high -- Taipei Times (November 17)
Taiwan nears recession, exports to China slump -- (October 31)
Taiwan exports in decline -- Voice of America (October 16)
GDP growth forecast cut to below 1% -- FocusTaiwan (October 15)
Tax revenue falls by 14.3% over previous year -- Taipei Times (October 13)
Rising pessimism about economy  -- China Post (October 12)
TISR poll: 81% believe economy in bad shape -- via Solidarity.tw (September 14)
TAIEX suffers worst-ever one-day drop -- Taipei Times (August 25)

What all that reporting is trying to say can be summed up succinctly by the chart at the top of this page: Taiwan's economy is now rather suddenly headed into a recession, if it's not already in one. And that makes this a terrible moment to be running as an incumbent party. 

Economic Voting in Democracies. The theory of economic voting behind this claim is that economic conditions powerfully shape electoral outcomes in democracies everywhere. As Michael Lewis-Beck puts it in a great review article, "good times keep parties in office, bad times cast them out."

I should note that the evidence for this effect and its size varies a lot across countries, and the sometimes puzzling variation in the size of economic effects remains an open area of inquiry in political science. 

For instance, when the government is supported by a coalition of several parties, it's harder for voters to figure out which members deserve the blame for bad performance. The lack of a credible alternative to the incumbent--an opposition party or candidate who appears likely to do better--also leads to a weaker effect. (The opposition to the LDP in Japan has long struggled with a credibility problem, for instance.) And sometimes it's clear to voters that governments don't have much influence at all over bad economic outcomes because of global factors beyond their control, so they are less likely to punish incumbents at the ballot box.

In addition, voters turn out to have really short memories (i.e. they're "myopic," in the jargon of the discipline): the performance of the economy over the last six months matters a great deal more than the performance over a government's whole term in office. This is probably why the Conservatives in Britain, for instance, recently won re-election after presiding over an austerity-induced downturn during much of their first term.

Nevertheless, the basic claim, that economic downturns motivate voters to vote out incumbent governments when they can, is quite robust. In the United States, in fact, the state of the economy in the few months before a presidential election appears to be the single most important factor in who wins, more than the candidates themselves, their parties' policy platforms, or their campaigns.  

Bad Economy = Bad Polls. At about the same point that the economy started to sour over the last six months, Taiwan's presidential election turned from a competitive race into a rout. As the Taiwan Indicators Survey Research survey reproduced above shows, at the beginning of June, one could at least imagine a combined pan-blue effort that would give Tsai Ing-wen a real race: support for Hung Hsiu-chu and James Soong together was at 44.8%, above Tsai's 37.1%. But then what happened? Support for both cratered.

Part of that was Hung's own shortcomings as a candidate, but once she was replaced by Eric Chu, the KMT should have seen a real bounce. It hasn't. Chu is now down around 20% in the polls. That's likely to go up somewhat as pan-blue voters come back to the fold, and there are other polls showing him getting up to 30%. But even if pan-blue voters coordinated on a single candidate, the combined Chu-Soong support is nowhere near enough to make this a race anymore. It's all but over now. 

Some of this decline in the polls is undoubtedly self-inflicted--the fiasco with Hung and the presence of James Soong in a spoiler's role yet again could probably have been avoided. But even if Eric Chu had accepted the nomination back in March, and Soong hadn't joined the race, I still don't think this would be much of a contest right now. The reason is those economic figures: Chu is the standard-bearer for a party that in voters' eyes is squarely to blame for this economic downturn, and they're going to have a chance in less than three weeks to weigh in.

​Tsai Ing-wen is not Ma Ying-jeou or the KMT, and in these circumstances that looks like all she needs to win a comfortable victory. Cross-Strait policy, debate performances, campaign promises, VP selections--none of it is going to matter. In this election, it really is about the economy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In my previous post, I argued that the DPP's vote share in the legislative district races was likely to track Tsai Ing-wen's vote share fairly closely. From that basic intuition, I came up with a rank list of seats indicating how many districts the DPP would win with a given vote share for Tsai. That forecast rested on several assumptions:

1. There wouldn't be a very large incumbent advantage for KMT legislators;
2. Tsai's increase in vote share over 2012 would be uniform across districts;
3. The electorate voting for president would look essentially the same as that voting for the legislature.

I spent much of the last post defending assumption 1. Here I want to relax assumption 2, that Tsai's vote share is going to increase uniformly across all districts. That's certainly not going to be true in a technical sense, but to what degree will it be violated? The conventional wisdom about Taiwan's electoral geography is that the the north is more solidly blue than other parts of Taiwan, so the KMT's vote share will decline less in Taipei than in, say, Tainan or Pingtung. But how much less is hard to predict.

Let me put the punch line up front: I don't think Tsai's increase in vote share is going to vary much by locality. Evidence follows after the jump.

This post is long overdue. Henry S. "Harry" Rowen died suddenly on November 12, 2015. He was an emeritus professor of public policy and management at Stanford and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Despite his age he maintained an office in the Asia-Pacific Research Center in Encina Hall, and he remained a common presence at Freeman Spogli Institute and Hoover events up until his passing. He was also involved in the Taiwan Democracy Project during its earliest days from 2003-2006, and its existence owes much to his interest and support.

On a more personal note, I will remember him best for his bold prediction in an article published in 1996 in the National Interest that China would become democratic by about 2015--a piece I still remember reading in my Chinese politics class as a college sophomore. He remained optimistic about China's political trajectory through the end of his career.

A fuller exposition on his long and storied career in government and as the president of the RAND corporation is here in the New York Times.

This is fun: we have an argument! I made some assertions and predictions in a post on the upcoming LY election, and Nathan Batto of the Frozen Garlic blog has taken me to task a bit.
 
So what's my response? Well, let me begin by agreeing with Nathan: I AM completely wrong about one big thing. I made an elementary error when I calculated the effects of a swing toward Tsai and away from the pan-blue camp: I forgot to divide by two. As a consequence, my forecast violated what I will now forever remember as the First Law of Swing: if one party goes up, some other party must come down (click that link, BTW, it's good stuff.) In hindsight, a really silly mistake. This pretty much sums up my position: ​

Nevertheless, simple mistake, simple fix. Divide by two, dummy. Below is the same ranking of LY seats, with an extra column added that gives the size of the swing needed to flip the district to the other camp (swing toward Tsai from 2012 is positive, swing away is negative).

(Updated data file is below. I've corrected a few errors in the previous file; they're listed in the documentation sheet. Most changes were small enough to be inconsequential, but Nathan pointed out a significant one: Tsai's Hualien vote in 2012 was 25.9, not 29.9. Thanks for catching that.)

Forecast, Take Two
With that mea culpa out of the way, I still think the basic approach here is sound, assuming one does the math right: go down the swing column, take a guess what you think Tsai will get above her 2012 vote share, and that’ll tell you roughly which districts she’ll carry. (Note that by "carry," I mean she'll win a majority over the combined Chu-Soong vote, not just a plurality over Chu.) And if Tsai carries a district, it’s going to be tough for the KMT candidate to hold it.

So, again assuming Taitung reverts to its natural blueness:

• the magic seat number for a DPP is still #41,
• that's still New Taipei 10.

For Tsai to carry that district, she'd need an increase in her vote share of 5.23% above 2012, or 45.63+5.23 = 50.86% of the total presidential vote.
 
Nathan argues that we should give KMT incumbents at least an extra two points cushion on average (see discussion below). So let's be conservative, do that for all KMT candidates (most of the seats the DPP would have to win are being defended by incumbents anyway), and round up. That means if Tsai wins at least 53% of the presidential vote, then the DPP is likely to have a majority in the LY. She’s currently polling well above 53%, so the DPP is a strong favorite to win a single-party majority. 

Thus, I'm actually coming down very close to Nathan's forecast that a Tsai share of the vote somewhere between 53-54% is sufficient to get the DPP to a majority.

I also agree that once Tsai gets much higher than that, the legislative election has the potential to turn into a slaughter. A uniform (big assumption!) 12 point swing toward Tsai (45.63-->57.63%) means she would carry every district all the way down to Hsinchu City, ranked #56 on the list. That would leave the KMT with at most about 17 district seats, which starts to look like the DPP's situation after 2008. (Unlike the DPP, the KMT is cushioned a bit by an advantage in the aborigine seats. But only a bit.)

So, basically, we're in agreement. But that's boring, so let's see if I can find something else to argue with Nathan about.

 Assumptions about 2016: Room for an Argument?
​As Nathan noted, debates are good because they force us to clarify our assumptions and claims and double-check our data. So in that spirit, let me list the key assumptions this forecast rests on (later I'll explore what happens when we relax a couple of these, so don't bug out yet!). They are:

• A1. DPP LY candidates will run close to Tsai in 2016; that is, every DPP candidate's vote share will be approximately the same as Tsai's LY district vote share.
• A2. The percent change in Tsai's vote from 2012 will be uniform across all LY districts.
• A3. The electorate in the presidential election in each district is the same as in the legislative election.* 
• A4. The DPP will win 16 non-SMD seats: 16 PR seats and no aborigine seats.

I'll tackle A1 now, and address the rest in separate posts. (Otherwise this post will be book-length by the time I'm done. And the election might already be over!)

A1: Will DPP LY candidates run close to Tsai in 2016?
This assumption can be challenged on at least two fronts: (1) incumbency advantage, and (2) the behavior of disaffected pan-blue voters. Nathan devoted a lot of space to (1), so I'll start with a consideration of that. Here's what I find when I run the numbers again: 

• "Incumbency advantage" in Taiwan does exist. Incumbents do better all else equal. Whether that's because they have the resources of office to draw on in elections, or they're better types, we can't say from just these data. It's probably a bit of both. But if you're trying to hold on to a seat, it's better to have the incumbent in the race than the challenger. So I agree with Nathan here.
• Once we look only at DPP-KMT head-to-head races: KMT incumbents ran ahead of Ma Ying-jeou on average in 2012 by about 1.4 points. And DPP incumbents actually ran further ahead of Tsai (+3.5 vs +1.4; Nathan's numbers are +4.5 to +2.2). So incumbents in both parties did systematically better than non-incumbents. I agree with Nathan here, too.
• But the big picture remains the same: relative to the potential swing we're talking about, any advantage the KMT will get from having incumbents running will be small. If Tsai is winning even 55% of the vote, a lot of KMT incumbents are toast even if their DPP opponents are running a couple points behind her. (I think Nathan agrees with this too.)

Now, the data. I initially claimed based on the full set of 73 districts that there wasn't evidence of a KMT "incumbent advantage" in 2012. That is, that KMT LY candidates didn't run significantly ahead of Ma Ying-jeou. Nathan argued quite sensibly that we should look only at those races where the KMT and DPP candidates together got almost all the vote. The question then is, what is "almost all"? Nathan went with 95% of the total vote. I initially went with no single 3rd party candidate winning >5% of the vote, which accounts for some of the discrepancy between us.

I've replicated his analysis with my data, and come up with similar numbers to his, although I find a weaker KMT incumbency advantage than he does (1.4 vs. 2.2 points ahead). The remaining discrepancy appears to be in our coding of incumbents in the head-to-head cases: I have 32 in the KMT, and 12 in the DPP, to 30 and 10 for Nathan. (I pulled my coding from the CEC website, which records party list legislators running in districts as incumbents, and I may have missed a couple of these. So I'd trust Nathan's incumbency coding over mine.) The signs remain the same, though, and so does the conclusion: incumbency provides an electoral benefit​, albeit a small one.

Instead of a crappy image of a simple table (dammit, Weebly), I find it more helpful to see a visual representation of what we're talking about. Below I've plotted the 2012 LY vote data against the presidential vote, distinguishing between incumbents (solid) and non-incumbents (hollow). The red line is just the function y=x; that is, dots above this line represent candidates who ran ahead of the presidential ticket, and dots below represent those who ran behind.

Here's the DPP:

This is a really good fit. The correlation between Tsai and the LY candidates vote share is about 0.826, and there's only one obvious outlier. (That's Kaohsiung 9, where Chen Chih-chung split the DPP vote.) Note also that even just at a glance, DPP incumbents appear to be doing significantly better than challengers: if we ignore Kaohsiung 9, all but about three are at or above the line, which means they got as many votes as Tsai did.*

Now let's look at the KMT:

The fit is...less good. (r=.377). There are a lot more outliers, especially in deep blue areas where Ma got a lot of the vote. If we want to evaluate whether there's an incumbent advantage on the KMT side as well, we need to account for this. Hence the decision to drop the 25 cases where there was a significant 3rd-party vote. 

Here's what the picture looks like with just the 48 districts where KMT+DPP LY vote > 95%: 

Ah, much better. Now the KMT looks a lot more like the DPP picture, and the correlation is about the same (r=.835 vs 0.860 for the DPP). I count 9 incumbents who clearly ran behind Ma, but at least 21 who ran ahead. Three of those even ran way ahead in tough districts where Ma got less than 42% of the vote. This is a demonstration that there's a KMT incumbency advantage, right? And isn't it therefore at least plausible that some KMT incumbents could survive a Tsai wave because of this, even if their districts turn green?

Well, yes, if you define this advantage as running significantly ahead of the KMT presidential standard-bearer, Ma. But this is not actually what matters for winning reelection. What the forecast above relies on is the Tsai vote in each district, which is the complement of not just the Ma vote but of Ma+Soong. In other words, I assumed that everyone voting for Soong would also vote for the KMT LY candidate in the district (in the head-to-head contests, I don't this this is crazy). If we add in Soong's 2.77%, then here's roughly what the picture looks like (Soong's 2012 vote varied a lot across districts, too, so this is a simplification):     

A bit less impressive: there are only six incumbents (of 32) who ran significantly ahead of the combined pan-blue presidential vote, and therefore would have won in districts where Tsai also won. There's just not a lot here from 2012 to indicate that the 40 KMT incumbents running in 2016, taken as a whole, have good odds of surviving if Tsai wins their districts, no matter how great their constituency service is. If it's like 2012, then we can expect about 20%, or eight, to run significantly ahead of the pan-blue presidential vote.

This is the main point that I tried--clumsily--to communicate in my previous post. Going into this analysis, I had a vague expectation that the KMT majority included quite a few districts that Tsai won in 2012 (that is, where LY vote of KMT > Ma + Soong), suggesting at least a plausible path to survival in this environment. (This stemmed from my own ignorance about 2012, not anything Nathan has written.) That's simply not the case, and unless 2016 is significantly different than 2012, this bodes very poorly for the survival of KMT legislators in districts on the 25-45 range on that list above.

Is 2016 going to be like 2012?
That leads me to the second issue: is 2016 going to be like 2012? Nathan argues that it won't be: the last election was a nearly perfect blue-green head-to-head fight, whereas 2016 will have a lot of disaffected pan-blue voters searching around for alternatives. And some of them will back Tsai, then turn around and vote for pan-blue LY candidates.  

Before I make my case for why I don't think this will be a large share of voters, a clarification: my goal here is to establish a baseline expectation for what district vote share DPP candidates will win with a given Tsai presidential vote share. So I'm focusing exclusively on the DPP side of the races. The mess of coordination failures on the pan-blue side is probably going to make this a conservative estimate, but again, I think it's useful to establish a generic partisan baseline first, before we start adjusting up or down, and it's much simpler to do that by starting with the DPP. 

Now, to the question about 2016. I expect Tsai's vote share and DPP LY vote shares will again be highly correlated in 2016. We know there are going to be a lot more Tsai supporters in 2016: some will be former or disaffected pan-blue voters, some will be independents, and some will be newly minted voters. Let's rank-order how likely green-blue split-ticket voting should be given the origin of these groups of Tsai voters:

1. Disaffected pan-blue voters.
2. Independents.
3. New voters (i.e. young people aged<24).

​Disaffected pan-blue voters are the most likely to cross over and vote for Tsai, then support their local pan-blue candidate in the LY race. (I'm going to leave aside the other two for the moment--I don't think either of these groups will do much ticket-splitting in the aggregate.) There are potentially a lot of blue-leaning Tsai voters. If most split their votes then DPP candidates are, indeed, going to run significantly behind Tsai in most districts, and she'll need a larger margin of victory to guarantee a DPP LY majority. But let me suggest three reasons why split-ticket voting may not be all that frequent even among this disaffected pan-blue population in the coming election. 

First is the shifting partisan identification of the electorate. Nathan wrote a very nice piece for the China Policy Institute blog about the shift in the number of pan-green vs pan-blue partisans over the last couple of years. (If you haven't read it yet, go do it--it's well worth your time.) The takeaway from that piece is that there are a lot fewer pan-blue identifiers now, and a lot more pan-green, than in 2012. How much? Well, instead of a 50-45 advantage in favor of the pan-blue, it's looking more and more from public opinion research like the ratio has flipped toward a green plurality. If we think about 2016 in this light, Tsai's increase in the polls is not entirely a protest vote against Ma and the KMT, but also reflects an increase in identification with the pan-green side of the political spectrum. It's difficult to estimate the size of that increase, but to the extent it's real it should help not just Tsai but DPP LY candidates, too.

Second is turnout. In the current environment, there are a lot of disgruntled pan-blue voters. They're presented with two presidential candidates, Chu and Soong, who aren't eliciting a lot of enthusiasm at this point. In addition, there's the little matter of how Chu ended up heading the KMT ticket: he arranged to have the previous nominee Hung Hsiu-chu dumped, and that angered her supporters within the party. It's not hard to imagine a significant chunk of the pan-blue side simply sitting this election out rather than casting a protest vote for Soong or Tsai. (There's also the matter of travel back from the PRC mainland to vote--it's costly for Taiwanese based there to do this, and the lack of a competitive race for president probably means many more of them will stay away.) If they do that, then those votes won't be there in the LY races either. 

Third is that the presidential and LY elections will be concurrent in 2016.  2012 was the first time that voters could cast a ballot for president and the legislature at the same time. Prior to that year, these elections were always held on different days, and often different years, which led to a significantly different electorate across these two types of races. In particular, presidential elections tended to have the highest turnout, with LY turnout 15-20% lower. I suspect, although I don't have the evidence at hand, that the KMT benefited the most from this lower turnout, because its resource advantages allowed it to push core supporters to the polls better than other parties. It's the kind of "hidden benefit" that can increase the size of the incumbency advantage and help sustain an LY majority for a long time even as the underlying nature of the electorate changes. But if the elections are held at the same time, this gap goes away. Just about everyone who shows up to vote in one election also votes in the other (unless they're deliberately boycotting something--see, e.g., the 2004 referendums). It's effectively the same electorate in both races.*

So while 2012 was a nearly perfect blue-green head-to-head contest, it's worth considering also the possibility that the close correlation between the presidential and LY elections that year was not exceptional, but more like a new norm. Like 2012, just about everyone who votes for president in 2016 will also vote for the LY. That means the fluctuation in turnout that we're used to seeing between presidential and LY elections will probably not be as stark going forward, and the likelihood that the presidency and LY will be controlled by different camps, as was true during the Chen Shui-bian era, will be lower from now on. (Note: I haven't looked much at the evidence here, and I'd be very interested to hear Nathan's and others' reactions to this speculation.)

For all these reasons, then, I think assuming a close correlation between Tsai's district vote share and the DPP candidate's in 2016 is a good way to start estimating how the legislative election will play out.

In future posts, I'll say something about the assumptions of a uniform swing, the complicating factor of separate yuanzhumin districts, and the PR seats. 

* I'm ignoring the fact that yuanzhumin (aborigine) voters don't vote in the same LY districts. In most cases this impact is minor, but in a couple districts they are 30% or more of the electorate. Since yuanzhumin voters have been to this point overwhelmingly pan-blue, this introduces a pan-blue bias into the forecast: I'm assuming those votes will be there in the LY races, which makes districts like Taitung or Hualien look a lot more blue than they really are. More on this in another post.

[UPDATE: some of the numbers in this post are wrong, including the forecast, which is way off; see the post above for the corrections.]

The race for the presidency in Taiwan appears all but over already: Tsai Ing-wen is going to win and it isn't going to be very close. What's both more uncertain and more challenging to forecast is what will happen in the legislative elections. I've seen some analyses that start with the results of each district race in 2012 as a baseline, then projects up from those results to estimate how many more seats the DPP will win with a particular partisan swing.

To me, the better place to start this kind of forecasting is with the 2012 presidential results in each district, when Tsai Ing-wen ran against Ma Ying-jeou and James Soong. The idea here is, put aside idiosyncrasies such as intra-camp splits and candidate quality, and just pit a generic DPP candidate for the legislature against a generic KMT one in a head-to-head competition. Then who should we expect to win? That's what the presidential results by district tell us. (This measure is roughly analogous to the Partisan Voter Index that the Cook Report does for the US every election cycle.)

A measure of "partisan balance" based on presidential election results is conceptually simple and straightforward, but it's also a bit of a pain to construct because in Taiwan the official data sources don't present presidential results in this way. In some cases (e.g. Taipei, Kaohsiung, and Taoyuan) the legislative boundaries divide municipal districts in two, so figuring out an LY district's partisan balance in many cases requires some tedious aggregation of presidential results up from the township or district, or even the li (里) level.

I haven't seen district-level presidential results available online anywhere, so as a public service I'm posting them in the excel file below, so that anyone who wants to can play around with the numbers.

(The source data, of course, are from the ROC Central Election Commission's elections database.) 

Ranking the 2016 Legislative Yuan District Seats by Partisan Balance
With the district-level results in hand, we can rank-order all 73 single-member districts* by the difference between the vote share won by the two camps in the presidential race (Tsai - (Ma+Soong)). I've also color-coded each district by which party currently holds the seat: green for the DPP, blue for the KMT. (For simplicity's sake I've just colored the two pan-blue independents--in Lienchiang and now in Hsinchu County--blue as well.) 

The full list is below. At the top is Tainan City 1, the district with the strongest lead for Tsai--the greenest, in Taiwan politics parlance. in 2012 Tsai won here 63.62% to 34.05% for Ma and 2.33% for Soong, for a net difference of 27.24. By this measure of partisan balance, this is the hardest district for a KMT candidate to win in the country. On the other end of the spectrum is Lienchiang County--Matsu--where Tsai won only 8.03% of the vote, compared to 86.81% for Ma, and 5.36% for Soong. No surprise here: Lienchiang and Kinmen (right above it) are the two hardest districts for a DPP candidate to win.

A few observations follow after the break.

I had the privilege yesterday of joining a two-panel roundtable session at George Washington University's Sigur Center for Asian Studies on the probable outcome and impacts of the upcoming Taiwan elections. Thanks to all who came to the event and asked great questions, and to Bruce Dickson for the invitation to participate.

I've gotten a couple requests for the slides from my presentation; they're linked here.

​The short version of the talk: reform of the Legislative Yuan should be at the top of the priority list for the next president. Outside of Taiwan, the potential twists and turns in cross-Strait relations dominate the conversation and tend to overshadow everything else happening in the domestic arena. But there are a lot of problems facing Taiwan right now that don't directly involve cross-Strait relations.

The incoming administration will face several daunting domestic policy challenges, including:

• a low tax base combined with a highly uneven distribution of the tax burden;
• widespread unhappiness with the Ma administration's China-first economic strategy, but no consensus about what to do instead, and long-standing opposition in the legislature to the kinds of domestic reforms required to enter the Trans-Pacific Partnership;
• a declining defense budget, now at 2% of GDP, and rising personnel costs from the faltering transition to an all-volunteer military force;
• a potential energy crisis driven by rising opposition to nuclear power without development of realistic alternatives. 

Whatever the next administration tries to do, it will face opposition from some corners of the legislature representing vested interests that would lose out under reforms. Under the Legislative Yuan Speaker Wang Jin-pyng, the LY's cross-party negotiation mechanism has in practice given any party caucus--even one with just three members--the ability to block most legislation. So the current system will prevent major changes on any of these issues unless Speaker Wang is replaced and the negotiation mechanism is weakened or abolished. 

If the DPP wins a majority in the legislature, it will have a golden opportunity to reform the party caucus system and make it easier to pass legislation with a simple majority vote. It's critical for their own political future, for Tsai Ing-wen's, and probably for Taiwan's, that they do.​

The Taiwan Democracy Project will hold its next seminar of the fall on December 1, in conjunction with the new U.S.-Asia Security Initiative at the Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford. The speaker is Cortez Cooper, a senior international policy analyst at the RAND Corporation. He will be speaking about potential changes in cross-Strait relations and China's security strategy in light of the upcoming 2016 presidential and legislative elections in Taiwan. The event is free and open to the public; you can register at the event page.

​The talk is entitled: "Of Paradigms, Politics and Principles: The 2016 Taiwan Elections and Implications for China’s Security Strategy and Cross-Strait Relations." Details are below.

One of the major figures in East Asian Studies at Stanford, Ramon H. Myers, died this month after a long illness. He was 86.

Myers was the former curator of the East Asian Collection at the Hoover Institution, where he played a central role in acquiring new materials on Taiwan's post-war history, including a vast collection of documents from the KMT party archive in Taipei as well as the Chiang Kai-shek diaries.

He also wrote several influential books and articles on Taiwan. The best-known in Taiwan studies is probably The First Chinese Democracy: Political Life in the Republic of China on Taiwan (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998, 2nd ed. 2002), with Linda Chao, but he also co-authored a history of the 2-28 Incident in 1947 and co-edited a widely-read volume on the Japanese pre-war colonial empire, among others. 

For those interested in a personal history of sorts, I recommend this interview conducted by Hsiao-ting Lin and Da-chi Liao in 2007, before he retired as curator. It gives a fascinating view into the practical challenges and opportunities and the intellectual cross-currents faced by his generation of East Asia scholars. I've excerpted a particularly interesting bit below:

...
Why did Hoover want to recruit you?
Good question!  The curator was a Chinese gentleman called Ma (馬).  His predecessor Eugene Wu had been in charge of the Yenching Library at Harvard.  Before him was Mary Wright.  I also took the name Ma (馬).  The first Ma was only at Hoover for 6 years, but he had a very serious problem with women.  Several of them went to Director Glenn Campbell and complained.  Campbell offered Ma the choice of resigning or being fired.  Campbell wanted a curator who was also a scholar and a fundraiser.  I did not know about all these internal developments until I had been here 2 years.  I applied to be a senior fellow, and the committee concurred. Finally, the President of Stanford University agreed.
 
Did you have connections with Taiwan then?
No.  That came 2 years later.  Wei Yong (魏鏞) had been a National Fellow at Hoover in 1974. But he left to take up a job in Chiang Ching-kuo’s cabinet.  Campbell and Wei Yong and also Yuan Li Wu (吳元黎) helped me to visit Taiwan. Richard Starr, who was Campbell’s deputy, suggested I take a couple of trips to Taiwan.  Based on these travels, I developed a friendship with many in the KMT. 
 
With Lee Teng-hui (李登輝)?
 I met him much earlier, when I went to Taiwan in 1959.  He was at the Nong Fu Hui (農復會) and Taida’s Agricultural Economics Department (台大農經系).  We were once at conferences together, and admired one another’s agricultural economic work, which was the focus of our dialogue.  When I went back on short 2-3 week trips to meet Taiwanese people, I developed an interest in the KMT, and began to learn about Taiwan; one thing led to another.  I wrote a book on the February 28 Incident (二二八事件) with two other Chinese scholars. Next visit was to go to the Sun Yat-sen University in Kaohsiung (中山大學) in 1982-83.
 
How did you know Qin Xiaoyi (秦孝儀)?
That was also accidental.  When Qin made his first visit to the US in 1984, he was invited to the Association for Asian Studies annual meeting in Chicago.  He wanted to come to Hoover or Stanford to get some publicity. I learned of his desire to visit Hoover before going to Chicago. So I arranged for Qin to come here. He gave a talk in the reading room of the East Asian Library. We had a huge audience for him to address.  He got a lot of publicity in the local newspaper about being invited to speak here.  He was very grateful and so he and Lee Huan (李煥) arranged for Edna (my wife) and me to go to the Sun Yat-sen University (中山大學).  Qin used his connection with Hoover to gain support from among the Chinese community.  This worked out very well for him and for us.  Then when I went out to Sun Yat-sen University, my ties with the KMT became closer.  I would say the Qin Xiaoyi’s trip in 1984 was very important.
 
Didn’t you know him before that?
I only had met him when he came to Hoover, and also two years later when Edna and I visited Kaohsiung. I also met Kuo Ta-chun (郭岱君), who came here on a grant from Institute of International Relations, National Cheng-chi University (政大國關中心). She came to Hoover and worked with me on a long article, which became a book on how to interpret Communist China.  We published it at the Hoover Press, and many people used it.  In the early 1980s, Western scholars were trying to re-evaluate the achievements of Chinese Communism, particularly Mao Zedong.  Our book was a comparison of how good the work of Taiwanese China-watchers compared with that of Europeans and America’s. I think we omitted the Japanese. We pointed out, quite credibly but controversially, that the Taiwanese Chinese-watchers were the best: they had met and were with Communist revolutionaries when they were doing underground spying. They had inside documents from intelligence sources far much better than we had.  They could make powerful arguments about CCP rule of China and interpret change.  Where they did best was interpreting how China was having a series of problems with the Communist system which proved that its problems were serious.
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