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Tsai Ing-wen campaigns with Huang Kuo-chang in New Taipei 12. (Credit: Taipei Times)
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:
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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Taiwan's 2008 presidential election voting patterns by township.
2012: greener everywhere, although this map doesn't show it very well.
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:
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.
- There wouldn't be a very large incumbent advantage for KMT legislators;
- Tsai's increase in vote share over 2012 would be uniform across districts;
- 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.
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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:
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:
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.
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.
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:
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:
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.
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:
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:
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%:
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):
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.
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:
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.
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:
- Disaffected pan-blue voters.
- Independents.
- New voters (i.e. young people aged<24).
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.
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.
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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.
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:
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.
- 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.
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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.
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.
Abstract
During the recent meeting between PRC President Xi Jinping and Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou, the “1992 One China Consensus” served as a mutually acceptable paradigm for maintaining “peaceful and stable” conditions across the Taiwan Strait. For Xi Jinping, the warmth of the visit thinly veiled a message to Taiwan’s leaders and electorate, as well as to onlookers in Washington. Chinese officials and media clearly link the talks and confirmation of the 1992 Consensus to “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”—a concept that is increasingly unpalatable to many in Taiwan. Xi hopes to keep DPP presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (and perhaps even future KMT leaders) in the 1992 Consensus “box” and to co-opt the U.S. in this effort, but perhaps underestimates the political transformation underway on Taiwan.
The Xi administration has also hardened its position regarding “core interests” such as Taiwan, embodied in a “bottom line principle” policy directive that eschews compromise. Although many commentators and most officials across the region have shied away from stating that the PRC and Taiwan are at the crossroads of crisis, the collision of political transformation on Taiwan and the PRC’s “bottom line principle” will challenge the fragile foundations of peaceful cross-Strait co-existence. Changes in the regional balance of military power brought about by a more muscular People’s Liberation Army compounds the potential for increased friction, providing Beijing with more credible options for coercion and deterrence.
This talk will consider the politics and principles involved in cross-Taiwan Strait relations in light of the upcoming 2016 Taiwan elections and the policies of the Xi Jinping administration; and will discuss some of the possible implications for China’s national security policy, regional stability, and the future of cross-Strait relations.
During the recent meeting between PRC President Xi Jinping and Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou, the “1992 One China Consensus” served as a mutually acceptable paradigm for maintaining “peaceful and stable” conditions across the Taiwan Strait. For Xi Jinping, the warmth of the visit thinly veiled a message to Taiwan’s leaders and electorate, as well as to onlookers in Washington. Chinese officials and media clearly link the talks and confirmation of the 1992 Consensus to “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”—a concept that is increasingly unpalatable to many in Taiwan. Xi hopes to keep DPP presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (and perhaps even future KMT leaders) in the 1992 Consensus “box” and to co-opt the U.S. in this effort, but perhaps underestimates the political transformation underway on Taiwan.
The Xi administration has also hardened its position regarding “core interests” such as Taiwan, embodied in a “bottom line principle” policy directive that eschews compromise. Although many commentators and most officials across the region have shied away from stating that the PRC and Taiwan are at the crossroads of crisis, the collision of political transformation on Taiwan and the PRC’s “bottom line principle” will challenge the fragile foundations of peaceful cross-Strait co-existence. Changes in the regional balance of military power brought about by a more muscular People’s Liberation Army compounds the potential for increased friction, providing Beijing with more credible options for coercion and deterrence.
This talk will consider the politics and principles involved in cross-Taiwan Strait relations in light of the upcoming 2016 Taiwan elections and the policies of the Xi Jinping administration; and will discuss some of the possible implications for China’s national security policy, regional stability, and the future of cross-Strait relations.
Bio
Mr. Cortez A. Cooper III joined RAND in April 2009, providing assessments of security challenges across political, military, economic, cultural, and informational arenas for a broad range of U.S. government clients. Prior to joining RAND, Mr. Cooper was the Director of the East Asia Studies Center for Hicks and Associates, Inc. He has also served in the U.S. Navy Executive Service as the Senior Analyst for the Joint Intelligence Center Pacific, U.S. Pacific Command. As the senior intelligence analyst and Asia regional specialist in the Pacific Theater, he advised Pacific Command leadership on trends and developments in the Command’s area of responsibility. Before his Hawaii assignment, Mr. Cooper was a Senior Analyst with CENTRA Technology, Inc., specializing in Asia-Pacific political-military affairs. Mr. Cooper’s 20 years of military service included assignments as both an Army Signal Corps Officer and a China Foreign Area Officer. In addition to numerous military decorations, the Secretary of Defense awarded Mr. Cooper with the Exceptional Civilian Service Award in 2001.
Mr. Cortez A. Cooper III joined RAND in April 2009, providing assessments of security challenges across political, military, economic, cultural, and informational arenas for a broad range of U.S. government clients. Prior to joining RAND, Mr. Cooper was the Director of the East Asia Studies Center for Hicks and Associates, Inc. He has also served in the U.S. Navy Executive Service as the Senior Analyst for the Joint Intelligence Center Pacific, U.S. Pacific Command. As the senior intelligence analyst and Asia regional specialist in the Pacific Theater, he advised Pacific Command leadership on trends and developments in the Command’s area of responsibility. Before his Hawaii assignment, Mr. Cooper was a Senior Analyst with CENTRA Technology, Inc., specializing in Asia-Pacific political-military affairs. Mr. Cooper’s 20 years of military service included assignments as both an Army Signal Corps Officer and a China Foreign Area Officer. In addition to numerous military decorations, the Secretary of Defense awarded Mr. Cooper with the Exceptional Civilian Service Award in 2001.
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The Taiwan Democracy Project is holding its annual conference this Monday and Tuesday, Oct. 26-27, at Stanford. The event is open to the public; you can register and find more details here. The conference description is below.
Taiwan's Democracy at a Crossroads: Options and Prospects for Constitutional Reform
These are unsettled times in Taiwanese politics. In recent months, prominent voices from across the spectrum have called for fundamental changes to the structure of Taiwan’s political system, ranging from simple reforms such as lowering the voting age to 18 to fundamental ones such as adopting a full presidential or parliamentary regime.
The impetus for constitutional reform has multiple sources. But at its core is a deeply problematic relationship between the executive and the legislature. When different parties controlled the two branches during the final years of the Chen Shui-bian administration, cooperation came to a standstill and governance suffered.
More surprisingly, executive-legislative confrontation returned with a vengeance in President Ma Ying-jeou’s second term, even though the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) held both the executive and a majority in the legislature. The prolonged struggle over cross-Strait agreements is only the most prominent of a series of political conflicts that have blocked the adoption of new policies and threatened the legitimacy of those that do pass. And it is not clear that the next administration and legislature will fare any better than previous ones.
For the 10th Annual Conference on Taiwan Democracy, we will consider proposals for reforms in the context of the strengths and weaknesses of Taiwan’s current constitutional structure. Among the topics to be considered at the conference are:
Conference participants will help to develop a set of recommendations for a non-partisan reform agenda for Taiwan, one that is informed by a clear understanding of both the most pressing challenges facing Taiwan’s democracy and of best practices in other successful young democracies.
These are unsettled times in Taiwanese politics. In recent months, prominent voices from across the spectrum have called for fundamental changes to the structure of Taiwan’s political system, ranging from simple reforms such as lowering the voting age to 18 to fundamental ones such as adopting a full presidential or parliamentary regime.
The impetus for constitutional reform has multiple sources. But at its core is a deeply problematic relationship between the executive and the legislature. When different parties controlled the two branches during the final years of the Chen Shui-bian administration, cooperation came to a standstill and governance suffered.
More surprisingly, executive-legislative confrontation returned with a vengeance in President Ma Ying-jeou’s second term, even though the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) held both the executive and a majority in the legislature. The prolonged struggle over cross-Strait agreements is only the most prominent of a series of political conflicts that have blocked the adoption of new policies and threatened the legitimacy of those that do pass. And it is not clear that the next administration and legislature will fare any better than previous ones.
For the 10th Annual Conference on Taiwan Democracy, we will consider proposals for reforms in the context of the strengths and weaknesses of Taiwan’s current constitutional structure. Among the topics to be considered at the conference are:
- Diagnosing the problems: What have been the sources and implications of political strife in Taiwan in recent years, both under divided and unified one-party control? What reforms, if any, might make these conflicts easier to resolve and increase the legitimacy of government policy-making?
- Executive type: Would switching to a different type of executive—presidential, parliamentary, or another form of semi-presidentialism—mitigate some of the disadvantages of Taiwan’s current system?
- Electoral systems: What are the problems with Taiwan’s current electoral system? What changes might mitigate some of the disadvantages?
- Direct democracy: What functions do Taiwan’s referendum and recall laws serve in practice? How would changes to these laws affect Taiwan’s democracy?
- Accountability institutions: How have Taiwan’s judiciary, Control Yuan, and prosecutorial agencies performed during periods of partisan conflict between the executive and legislative branches? How might their effectiveness be improved?
- Comparative perspectives: How does Taiwan’s recent experience with divided government and institutional reform compare to other Third Wave democracies in the region (e.g. South Korea, SE Asia) and more broadly (e.g. Latin America, Eastern Europe)?
Conference participants will help to develop a set of recommendations for a non-partisan reform agenda for Taiwan, one that is informed by a clear understanding of both the most pressing challenges facing Taiwan’s democracy and of best practices in other successful young democracies.
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One of the more creative ways to run away from the KMT's toxic brand right now: a billboard for the new Republic Party (Min-Kuo Tang, a play on the Kuo-min Tang).
We're now four months away from the presidential and legislative elections in Taiwan, to be held on January 16th. At this point polls start to tell us something meaningful about how the election will turn out. To my eye, there are three things that stick out:
1. Taiwanese voters care most about the economy, and they overwhelmingly evaluate it as "bad."
A Taiwan Brain Trust poll that came out yesterday reports that about 64% of respondents named economic development as the primary issue in next year's elections--far outstripping government effectiveness (about 17%) and cross-Strait relations (only about 4.5%).
Another poll from Taiwan Indicators Survey Research ll (TISR) that came out on Monday finds that an astounding 84% of respondents evaluated the overall state of the domestic economy as "bad" ("認為國內整體經濟狀況不好“); only 8% thought it was good.
The headline numbers in both these polls focus on support for the three major candidates--Tsai Ing-wen, Hung Hsiu-chu, and Soong Chu-yu (aka James Soong). I think they're burying the lede. Economic conditions are a powerful determinant of election outcomes: in general, incumbents get the credit when people think the economic is doing well, and they get the blame when it is not--whether or not they actually have much control over economic outcomes at all. So the fact that most Taiwanese poll respondents are emphasizing the state of the economy, and that the large majority think it is bad, bodes very poorly for the KMT. (Note that this cannot just be Pan-Green supporters expressing discontent about the economy: this is 84% of all respondents. Dissatisfaction with the economy crosses party lines.)
These results suggest that, like in the local elections in 2014, the KMT is going to be fighting a massive headwind. Even if they had a strong candidate (ahem, Chu Li-lun?) atop the ticket, I would expect them to lose with these numbers. With Hung Hsiu-chu as the nominee, and James Soong running yet another third-party campaign that's offering an alternative to Pan-Blue voters who don't like Hung, the presidential election already looks overdetermined. The KMT is going to lose, badly. And Tsai Ing-wen, by default, is going to win.
At this point, though, I'd be very cautious about interpreting an impending DPP victory as anything other than a rejection of the KMT. There will inevitably be people in Taiwan and in Washington, DC who will frame this outcome as a repudiation of closer cross-Strait relations with the PRC, or an endorsement of Taiwanese independence. It's time to start beating the drum that the election is not about cross-Strait relations. It's not about independence or unification. It's not really even about a new "third force" of youth activism and social progressive politics. The 2016 election is about the economy.
1. Taiwanese voters care most about the economy, and they overwhelmingly evaluate it as "bad."
A Taiwan Brain Trust poll that came out yesterday reports that about 64% of respondents named economic development as the primary issue in next year's elections--far outstripping government effectiveness (about 17%) and cross-Strait relations (only about 4.5%).
Another poll from Taiwan Indicators Survey Research ll (TISR) that came out on Monday finds that an astounding 84% of respondents evaluated the overall state of the domestic economy as "bad" ("認為國內整體經濟狀況不好“); only 8% thought it was good.
The headline numbers in both these polls focus on support for the three major candidates--Tsai Ing-wen, Hung Hsiu-chu, and Soong Chu-yu (aka James Soong). I think they're burying the lede. Economic conditions are a powerful determinant of election outcomes: in general, incumbents get the credit when people think the economic is doing well, and they get the blame when it is not--whether or not they actually have much control over economic outcomes at all. So the fact that most Taiwanese poll respondents are emphasizing the state of the economy, and that the large majority think it is bad, bodes very poorly for the KMT. (Note that this cannot just be Pan-Green supporters expressing discontent about the economy: this is 84% of all respondents. Dissatisfaction with the economy crosses party lines.)
These results suggest that, like in the local elections in 2014, the KMT is going to be fighting a massive headwind. Even if they had a strong candidate (ahem, Chu Li-lun?) atop the ticket, I would expect them to lose with these numbers. With Hung Hsiu-chu as the nominee, and James Soong running yet another third-party campaign that's offering an alternative to Pan-Blue voters who don't like Hung, the presidential election already looks overdetermined. The KMT is going to lose, badly. And Tsai Ing-wen, by default, is going to win.
At this point, though, I'd be very cautious about interpreting an impending DPP victory as anything other than a rejection of the KMT. There will inevitably be people in Taiwan and in Washington, DC who will frame this outcome as a repudiation of closer cross-Strait relations with the PRC, or an endorsement of Taiwanese independence. It's time to start beating the drum that the election is not about cross-Strait relations. It's not about independence or unification. It's not really even about a new "third force" of youth activism and social progressive politics. The 2016 election is about the economy.
2. The KMT is really unpopular, but support for the DPP and Tsai Ing-wen is soft.
Dissatisfaction with the KMT is really high right now. Taiwan Brain Trust puts it at 71%, which is a significant improvement from December 2014, when the rate was 80%.
What is more surprising is that the DPP is still not very popular in absolute terms. Throughout 2015, the DPP has had higher negatives than positives in the Taiwan Brain Trust survey results. The most recent poll finds about 45% dissatisfied with the DPP, and 42% satisfied. That's actually a significant improvement as well; for polls in March, April, and June over half of respondents were dissatisfied with the DPP. The TISR results are more positive for both the DPP and KMT, probably because survey uses a "feelings thermometer" to rank the parties on a scale from 0 to 100: the DPP ranks slightly positively with a net score of 52.0, as compared to the KMT's 35.7. That's still not particularly strong given the circumstances.
Tsai Ing-wen's polling support is also still short of 50%; TISR finds 43.6% of respondents intend to vote for her, which is a new high in recent months. Undecideds and those saying they won't vote combined are still 25% of the electorate. Taiwan Brain Trust puts it a bit higher, at 46.8%.
What this suggests to me, again, is that Tsai and the DPP are positioned to do well in 2016 mostly because they're not Ma Ying-jeou and the KMT. Given how widespread dissatisfaction with the economy is right now, they're going to win a lot of swing votes as the "lesser of two evils."
Dissatisfaction with the KMT is really high right now. Taiwan Brain Trust puts it at 71%, which is a significant improvement from December 2014, when the rate was 80%.
What is more surprising is that the DPP is still not very popular in absolute terms. Throughout 2015, the DPP has had higher negatives than positives in the Taiwan Brain Trust survey results. The most recent poll finds about 45% dissatisfied with the DPP, and 42% satisfied. That's actually a significant improvement as well; for polls in March, April, and June over half of respondents were dissatisfied with the DPP. The TISR results are more positive for both the DPP and KMT, probably because survey uses a "feelings thermometer" to rank the parties on a scale from 0 to 100: the DPP ranks slightly positively with a net score of 52.0, as compared to the KMT's 35.7. That's still not particularly strong given the circumstances.
Tsai Ing-wen's polling support is also still short of 50%; TISR finds 43.6% of respondents intend to vote for her, which is a new high in recent months. Undecideds and those saying they won't vote combined are still 25% of the electorate. Taiwan Brain Trust puts it a bit higher, at 46.8%.
What this suggests to me, again, is that Tsai and the DPP are positioned to do well in 2016 mostly because they're not Ma Ying-jeou and the KMT. Given how widespread dissatisfaction with the economy is right now, they're going to win a lot of swing votes as the "lesser of two evils."
3. The NPP might replace the TSU in the legislature.
The Taiwan Solidarity Union has three seats in the current LY. They're the deep green alternative to the DPP, and they've been struggling to hang on ever since the electoral system change in 2008 shut them out of the legislature. They need to pass 5% in the party list vote to get seats, which they did easily in 2012, winning 8.96%. They're currently polling at less than half that: they're at about 4.1% in the Taiwan Brain Trust poll. They're being outpolled now by the New Power Party (時代力量), at 6.8%, and James Soong's People First Party at 5.6%.
There's a real possibility that the NPP takes a lot of votes from the TSU, passing the PR threshold while the TSU doesn't, and effectively replacing it on the deep green end of the political spectrum. It's notoriously difficult to poll support for small parties, so treat these as very rough estimates. The NPP is deliberately trying to appeal to young voters, who turn out at lower rates and are less predictable in their voting patterns than older generations. For another, the NPP is actually cooperating with the DPP in its district nominations--I'm not sure how this might affect the party list vote.
(A third reason to be wary of the Taiwan Brain Trust numbers on the small parties: Hsu Yung-ming (徐永明), a professor at Soochow University, is both the polling director for the survey and now a legislative candidate for the NPP.)
There's a real danger here for the Pan-Green camp if their voters fail to coordinate in the party list vote: the Green Party and Social Democratic Party are running a joint list that may appeal to a lot of the same young, well-educated voters that the NPP is making a play for. They're currently polling at 1.8%, according to the Taiwan Brain Trust survey. It's not hard to imagine the NPP, Green-SDP, and TSU all pulling some Pan-Green support and each getting 3-4% of the PR list vote, leaving them all with no seats, while the PFP passes the threshold and wins several seats. If the district results end up closely split, the Pan-Green camp could even be denied a majority in the LY despite a significant advantage in the overall share of the vote.
While I don't think it's particularly likely to happen, a Pan-Green win in the popular vote that leaves a Pan-Blue majority in control of the legislature would be a serious problem for Taiwan's democracy. So one thing I'll be paying close attention to in this election is how, or whether, this coordination problem is resolved in some way before the election.
The Taiwan Solidarity Union has three seats in the current LY. They're the deep green alternative to the DPP, and they've been struggling to hang on ever since the electoral system change in 2008 shut them out of the legislature. They need to pass 5% in the party list vote to get seats, which they did easily in 2012, winning 8.96%. They're currently polling at less than half that: they're at about 4.1% in the Taiwan Brain Trust poll. They're being outpolled now by the New Power Party (時代力量), at 6.8%, and James Soong's People First Party at 5.6%.
There's a real possibility that the NPP takes a lot of votes from the TSU, passing the PR threshold while the TSU doesn't, and effectively replacing it on the deep green end of the political spectrum. It's notoriously difficult to poll support for small parties, so treat these as very rough estimates. The NPP is deliberately trying to appeal to young voters, who turn out at lower rates and are less predictable in their voting patterns than older generations. For another, the NPP is actually cooperating with the DPP in its district nominations--I'm not sure how this might affect the party list vote.
(A third reason to be wary of the Taiwan Brain Trust numbers on the small parties: Hsu Yung-ming (徐永明), a professor at Soochow University, is both the polling director for the survey and now a legislative candidate for the NPP.)
There's a real danger here for the Pan-Green camp if their voters fail to coordinate in the party list vote: the Green Party and Social Democratic Party are running a joint list that may appeal to a lot of the same young, well-educated voters that the NPP is making a play for. They're currently polling at 1.8%, according to the Taiwan Brain Trust survey. It's not hard to imagine the NPP, Green-SDP, and TSU all pulling some Pan-Green support and each getting 3-4% of the PR list vote, leaving them all with no seats, while the PFP passes the threshold and wins several seats. If the district results end up closely split, the Pan-Green camp could even be denied a majority in the LY despite a significant advantage in the overall share of the vote.
While I don't think it's particularly likely to happen, a Pan-Green win in the popular vote that leaves a Pan-Blue majority in control of the legislature would be a serious problem for Taiwan's democracy. So one thing I'll be paying close attention to in this election is how, or whether, this coordination problem is resolved in some way before the election.
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Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) is now the official KMT nominee for president in 2016. She has a reputation as a deep-Blue partisan without a demonstrated ability to appeal to moderates. If that's true, it bodes poorly for the ruling party's chances.
But is it true? This anonymous article at Thinking Taiwan* attempts to make that case by examining her district vote totals in elections to the Legislative Yuan, which is the most concrete data we have about her electoral appeal. (Hung was elected as a KMT member from Taipei County in 1989, 1992, 1995, 2001, and 2004, and on the KMT party list in 1998, 2008 and 2012; the actual numbers are available here, from the Election Study Center at National Cheng Chi University.) Good for the writer for actually trying to supply some hard evidence for this claim, but in truth these results tell us very little about Hung's mass appeal.
The reason is that pre-2008 LY vote returns are from multi-member districts, and all the major parties used vote equalization (配票) systems in these elections. Vote totals for Hung or any other LY candidate nominated by a party can't be taken at face value as an indication of popularity. To imply otherwise is poor analysis.
A Quick Primer on Elections under Single Non-Transferable Vote
To see why, let's take a step back and remember how parties campaigned in these districts. Until 2008, elections to the legislature were held using the Single Non-Transferable Vote (SNTV) system. SNTV is defined by:
SNTV has a lot of features that make it unloved among electoral systems geeks, which is one of the reasons it was replaced for the legislature in Taiwan. (Nevertheless, it's still used for every other lower-level council election.) The most important is that it presents two serious coordination problems for the largest political parties, which increase in difficulty with the number of seats elected from a single district:
But is it true? This anonymous article at Thinking Taiwan* attempts to make that case by examining her district vote totals in elections to the Legislative Yuan, which is the most concrete data we have about her electoral appeal. (Hung was elected as a KMT member from Taipei County in 1989, 1992, 1995, 2001, and 2004, and on the KMT party list in 1998, 2008 and 2012; the actual numbers are available here, from the Election Study Center at National Cheng Chi University.) Good for the writer for actually trying to supply some hard evidence for this claim, but in truth these results tell us very little about Hung's mass appeal.
The reason is that pre-2008 LY vote returns are from multi-member districts, and all the major parties used vote equalization (配票) systems in these elections. Vote totals for Hung or any other LY candidate nominated by a party can't be taken at face value as an indication of popularity. To imply otherwise is poor analysis.
A Quick Primer on Elections under Single Non-Transferable Vote
To see why, let's take a step back and remember how parties campaigned in these districts. Until 2008, elections to the legislature were held using the Single Non-Transferable Vote (SNTV) system. SNTV is defined by:
- Multi-member districts, i.e. more than one representative will be elected from a single district;
- Voters can cast only a single ballot for only one candidate (not a party, and not multiple candidates);
- The top M vote-getters all win a seat, where M is the number of seats in a district.
SNTV has a lot of features that make it unloved among electoral systems geeks, which is one of the reasons it was replaced for the legislature in Taiwan. (Nevertheless, it's still used for every other lower-level council election.) The most important is that it presents two serious coordination problems for the largest political parties, which increase in difficulty with the number of seats elected from a single district:
- A nomination problem. Parties have to estimate prior to the election how much support they have in the district to know how many candidates to nominate. Nominate too few, and your nominees all win but with many votes to spare, and all the extras could have won you another seat. Nominate too many, and your votes will be spread too thinly, leading in the worst-case scenario to a shutout when you could have won several seats. This gets harder the less information parties have about their level of support.
- A vote distribution problem. To maximize the expected number of seats they'll win, parties have to get their supporters to distribute their votes as evenly as possible across multiple nominees. This can be a real challenge if one or two candidates are much more popular and well-known. If voters cast their ballots sincerely, then popular nominees will win with thousands of votes to spare, while lesser-known candidates from the same party will be overshadowed and lose.
How to Solve Vote Allocation Problems: Randomization vs Responsibility Zones
Political parties in Taiwan have developed a number of ways to deal with these problems so that they can maximize their seat share. The DPP's most common strategy has been to randomize the votes: the party instructs its core supporters to ignore the candidates' identities entirely and "randomly" vote for one of the DPP nominees.
Political parties in Taiwan have developed a number of ways to deal with these problems so that they can maximize their seat share. The DPP's most common strategy has been to randomize the votes: the party instructs its core supporters to ignore the candidates' identities entirely and "randomly" vote for one of the DPP nominees.
DPP campaign poster showing the vote-randomization system for candidates in Tainan County, 2004 Legislative Yuan election.
For instance, in 2004, the DPP nominated five candidates for the legislature in Tainan County, a district with eight seats. The party then told its supporters to cast a ballot based on the last number of the voter's national ID card (see above). All five DPP candidates won; here were their vote shares:
The randomization scheme is not a DPP innovation, by the way; the New Party also used this system in Taipei back when it was competitive. In general, the more ideological a party’s voters, the more appealing a randomization scheme is.
In contrast, the KMT traditionally employed “responsibility zones” (責任區) within the larger districts: each official nominee was assigned some areas (usually groups of wards or villages) that were their exclusive zones to campaign in, and they were not supposed to appeal to voters in other areas.** The KMT also would hold back some of their so-called “iron vote” (鐵票) precincts—typically villages filled with military personnel, civil servants, and their families who could be expected to loyally support the party en masse. In the days leading up to the election, if a couple of the party’s candidates appeared to be doing worse than expected, the party strategists would at the last moment direct some of the iron vote to them to bolster their chances of winning. The responsibility zone system was used widely by the KMT in the 1980s and 90s because it worked well and gave them a systematic advantage: the party could exploit the advantages of its connections to local factions, its superior knowledge of local support levels, and its almost complete control of local ward chiefs and vote-brokers.
- (1-2) Lee Jun-yi 李俊毅: 9.28%
- (3-4) Huang Wei-je 黃偉哲: 8.56%
- (5-6) Yeh I-chin 葉宜津: 6.64%
- (7-8) Cheng Kuo-chung 鄭國忠: 10.01%
- (9-0) Hou Shui-cheng 侯水盛: 10.09%
The randomization scheme is not a DPP innovation, by the way; the New Party also used this system in Taipei back when it was competitive. In general, the more ideological a party’s voters, the more appealing a randomization scheme is.
In contrast, the KMT traditionally employed “responsibility zones” (責任區) within the larger districts: each official nominee was assigned some areas (usually groups of wards or villages) that were their exclusive zones to campaign in, and they were not supposed to appeal to voters in other areas.** The KMT also would hold back some of their so-called “iron vote” (鐵票) precincts—typically villages filled with military personnel, civil servants, and their families who could be expected to loyally support the party en masse. In the days leading up to the election, if a couple of the party’s candidates appeared to be doing worse than expected, the party strategists would at the last moment direct some of the iron vote to them to bolster their chances of winning. The responsibility zone system was used widely by the KMT in the 1980s and 90s because it worked well and gave them a systematic advantage: the party could exploit the advantages of its connections to local factions, its superior knowledge of local support levels, and its almost complete control of local ward chiefs and vote-brokers.
You Can't Infer Candidate Appeal Solely from Election Returns under SNTV
So what do election results under this system tell us about Hung Hsiu-chu’s appeal as a candidate? Very little. Because the KMT imposed a vote distribution system in the LY elections, individual candidate vote totals are not a reliable indication of how popular the candidates are.
For instance, here’s her vote returns from the legislative election in Taipei County in 1992, by administrative area:
So what do election results under this system tell us about Hung Hsiu-chu’s appeal as a candidate? Very little. Because the KMT imposed a vote distribution system in the LY elections, individual candidate vote totals are not a reliable indication of how popular the candidates are.
For instance, here’s her vote returns from the legislative election in Taipei County in 1992, by administrative area:
- Banqiao City: 2.33%
- Sanchong City: 0.89%
- Zhonghe City: 4.2%
- Yonghe City: 14.39%
- Xinzhuang City: 1%
- Xindian City: 4.52%
- Shulin City: 1.01%
- Yingge Township: 0.99%
- Sanxia Township: 1.55%
- Danshui Township: 2.08%
- Xizhi City: 1.06%
- Ruifang Township: 1.02%
- Tucheng City: 2.78%
- Luzhou City: 0.98%
- Wugu Township: 0.74%
- Taishan Township: 1.21%
- Linkou Township: 1.14%
- Shenkeng Township: 2.42%
- Shiding Township: 1.31%
- Pinglin Township: 3.95%
- Sanzhi Township: 1.37%
- Shimen Township: 0.91%
- Bali Township: 0.94%
- Pingxi Township: 1.59%
- Shuangxi Township: 0.56%
- Gongliao Township: 1.76%
- Jinshan Township: 0.68%
- Wanli Township: 2.43%
- Wulai Township: 5.82%
Now, a couple of things about 1992: it was the first election for the full legislature, and Taipei County was a single electoral district with 16 seats--huge, by SNTV standards. This was close to a worst-case scenario for political parties trying to equalize votes: there hadn't been a previous full LY election to provide info about each party's expected support, and the district magnitude (i.e. # of seats) is really high. An effective vote distribution system is critically important for party success, and also really hard to implement here.
These results show Hung was much stronger in some areas than others (Yonghe, Zhonghe, Xindian, Wulai, and Pinglin stand out), but they don’t show where her responsibility zones were or if she needed help from the “iron vote.” If I had to guess, I'd say she was assigned to Yonghe and parts of the four other cities she was strongest in: they're all clustered together just south of Taipei. But we can't tell that from the returns; and they also tell us nothing about whether she over- or under-performed relative to expectations.
The one thing we can say from these figures is how the KMT itself did. The last winner in this district was Chou Po-lun (周伯倫) of the DPP, who got 2.65% of the vote. Hung got 3.04%. Of the 17 KMT candidates, not all of whom were nominated, 10 were elected, with vote shares ranging from 2.66% to 5.89%, and the KMT won 62.5% of the seats with 45.7% of the vote. From the KMT’s perspective, that was a terrific result, and Hung’s share of the vote was just about perfect: safely above the cutoff point, but not too much above that a lot of votes were wasted. That tells us that Hung, and most of the other elected KMT candidates, probably played by the party’s rules. What it does not tell us is that Hung had no mass appeal, because demonstrating that wasn't her objective in this (or any of the other) LY elections.
If critics want to cast Hung as a deep-Blue ideologue with no ability to win votes from moderates, fine. She hasn't shown that ability, it's true. But she also has never been asked to. Her past election results tell us very little about how she'll do as the KMT candidate for president.
These results show Hung was much stronger in some areas than others (Yonghe, Zhonghe, Xindian, Wulai, and Pinglin stand out), but they don’t show where her responsibility zones were or if she needed help from the “iron vote.” If I had to guess, I'd say she was assigned to Yonghe and parts of the four other cities she was strongest in: they're all clustered together just south of Taipei. But we can't tell that from the returns; and they also tell us nothing about whether she over- or under-performed relative to expectations.
The one thing we can say from these figures is how the KMT itself did. The last winner in this district was Chou Po-lun (周伯倫) of the DPP, who got 2.65% of the vote. Hung got 3.04%. Of the 17 KMT candidates, not all of whom were nominated, 10 were elected, with vote shares ranging from 2.66% to 5.89%, and the KMT won 62.5% of the seats with 45.7% of the vote. From the KMT’s perspective, that was a terrific result, and Hung’s share of the vote was just about perfect: safely above the cutoff point, but not too much above that a lot of votes were wasted. That tells us that Hung, and most of the other elected KMT candidates, probably played by the party’s rules. What it does not tell us is that Hung had no mass appeal, because demonstrating that wasn't her objective in this (or any of the other) LY elections.
If critics want to cast Hung as a deep-Blue ideologue with no ability to win votes from moderates, fine. She hasn't shown that ability, it's true. But she also has never been asked to. Her past election results tell us very little about how she'll do as the KMT candidate for president.
* From Solidarity.tw, apparently.
**A fun aside: this is one of the best-studied topics in Taiwanese politics research. Among the prominent work on this is from the current chair of the Central Electoral Commission, Liu I-chou, who wrote his dissertation on the KMT’s responsibility zone system. Also, a big chunk of Shelley Rigger’s Politics in Taiwan, one of the best-known English-language books on Taiwanese elections, extensively covers party strategy in SNTV elections.
**A fun aside: this is one of the best-studied topics in Taiwanese politics research. Among the prominent work on this is from the current chair of the Central Electoral Commission, Liu I-chou, who wrote his dissertation on the KMT’s responsibility zone system. Also, a big chunk of Shelley Rigger’s Politics in Taiwan, one of the best-known English-language books on Taiwanese elections, extensively covers party strategy in SNTV elections.
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On March 9, the Taiwan Democracy Project hosted Lu-huei Chen, research professor and former director of the Election Study Center at National Chengchi University, Taipei. His talk was entitled "Electoral Politics and Cross-Strait Relations." The official event page is here.
Professor Chen is Distinguished Research Fellow at the Election Study Center and Professor of Political Science at National Chengchi University in Taiwan. He is currently a visiting scholar of Top University Strategic Alliance (TUSA) at MIT. Professor Chen received his Ph. D. in political science from Michigan State University. His research focuses on political behavior, political socialization, research methods, and cross-Strait relations. He has published articles in Issues and Studies, Journal of Electoral Studies (in Chinese), Social Science Quarterly, and Taiwan Political Science Review (in Chinese). He is the editor of Continuity and Change in Taiwan's 2012 Presidential and Legislative Election (in Chinese, 2013), Public Opinion Polls (in Chinese, 2013), and co-edited The 2008 Presidential Election: A Critical Election on Second Turnover (in Chinese, with Chi Huang and Ching-hsin Yu, 2009).
Professor Chen is Distinguished Research Fellow at the Election Study Center and Professor of Political Science at National Chengchi University in Taiwan. He is currently a visiting scholar of Top University Strategic Alliance (TUSA) at MIT. Professor Chen received his Ph. D. in political science from Michigan State University. His research focuses on political behavior, political socialization, research methods, and cross-Strait relations. He has published articles in Issues and Studies, Journal of Electoral Studies (in Chinese), Social Science Quarterly, and Taiwan Political Science Review (in Chinese). He is the editor of Continuity and Change in Taiwan's 2012 Presidential and Legislative Election (in Chinese, 2013), Public Opinion Polls (in Chinese, 2013), and co-edited The 2008 Presidential Election: A Critical Election on Second Turnover (in Chinese, with Chi Huang and Ching-hsin Yu, 2009).
Electoral Politics and Cross-Strait Relations
Cross-Strait relations play an important role in electoral politics in Taiwan. Increasing economic exchange together with warming political engagements make today’s cross-Strait relations a very unique case in the study of public opinion in Taiwan. Because of the economic prosperity of China, people in Taiwan might consider the expansion of trade and other forms of cross-Strait exchanges beneficial to the prosperity of Taiwan. However, growing trade ties also mean that Taiwan’s economic reliance on the mainland increases day by day, and it could eventually result in political unification—an outcome that the majority of people in Taiwan do not want. The long-standing antagonism across the Strait, especially visible in their different governing systems and ideological attitudes, has produced something close to two separate countries and contrasting national identities. Dr. Chen was former Director of Election Study Center of National Chengchi University in Taiwan, and he will present long-term polling tracks to demonstrate how cross-Strait relations have affected electoral politics in Taiwan.
Cross-Strait relations play an important role in electoral politics in Taiwan. Increasing economic exchange together with warming political engagements make today’s cross-Strait relations a very unique case in the study of public opinion in Taiwan. Because of the economic prosperity of China, people in Taiwan might consider the expansion of trade and other forms of cross-Strait exchanges beneficial to the prosperity of Taiwan. However, growing trade ties also mean that Taiwan’s economic reliance on the mainland increases day by day, and it could eventually result in political unification—an outcome that the majority of people in Taiwan do not want. The long-standing antagonism across the Strait, especially visible in their different governing systems and ideological attitudes, has produced something close to two separate countries and contrasting national identities. Dr. Chen was former Director of Election Study Center of National Chengchi University in Taiwan, and he will present long-term polling tracks to demonstrate how cross-Strait relations have affected electoral politics in Taiwan.
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DPP presidential candidate Tsai Ying-wen at a campaign rally in November 2011; she lost the 2012 presidential election to Ma Ying-jeou, 51.6-45.6%
The local elections on November 29th in Taiwan were a resounding defeat for the ruling KMT, and a major victory for the DPP. Taiwan’s main opposition party captured seven county and city executives from the KMT, raising their total from 6 to 13 of Taiwan’s local jurisdictions. DPP mayors now lead four of Taiwan’s six special municipalities: Taoyuan, Taichung, Tainan, and Kaohsiung. In addition, the nominally independent Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) received tacit DPP support for his successful bid for Taipei mayor, booting the KMT out of the mayor’s office there for the first time in 16 years. Only in New Taipei did the KMT manage to hang on, thanks in part to the personal popularity of the incumbent mayor Eric Chu (朱立倫).
Equally striking was the swing away from the KMT at lower levels, where the party’s candidates have traditionally been more insulated from national trends: the number of KMT councilors dropped from 419 to 386 (out of 907), and KMT township heads fell from 121 to 80 (out of 204). The KMT now holds a majority on only 6 of 23 city and county councils—remarkable for a party that could once count on control of the vast majority of local offices to help it mobilize votes for national elections. The consistent swing away from the KMT across every jurisdiction in Taiwan suggests that this was a “wave” election—unhappiness with the ruling party and its chairman, President Ma Ying-jeou, drove a national slump in KMT support that showed up in vote totals nearly everywhere. Indeed, this was arguably the KMT’s worst-ever performance in a local election: only 1997 comes close, and the fact that all local offices were on the ballot this year, including the special municipalities, makes this a more consequential defeat than that election. (These figures are drawn from a presentation I gave at a Stanford roundtable on December 2; the slides from that talk are available here.)
It’s a little late for me to weigh in on the debate over why the KMT fared so badly—plenty of other people have done that already, and the impact is rapidly fading into the past as Taiwanese politics churns along. Instead, in this post I want to look forward and ask: what does the 2014 election tell us about future election outcomes in Taiwan, especially the 2016 presidential race?
Equally striking was the swing away from the KMT at lower levels, where the party’s candidates have traditionally been more insulated from national trends: the number of KMT councilors dropped from 419 to 386 (out of 907), and KMT township heads fell from 121 to 80 (out of 204). The KMT now holds a majority on only 6 of 23 city and county councils—remarkable for a party that could once count on control of the vast majority of local offices to help it mobilize votes for national elections. The consistent swing away from the KMT across every jurisdiction in Taiwan suggests that this was a “wave” election—unhappiness with the ruling party and its chairman, President Ma Ying-jeou, drove a national slump in KMT support that showed up in vote totals nearly everywhere. Indeed, this was arguably the KMT’s worst-ever performance in a local election: only 1997 comes close, and the fact that all local offices were on the ballot this year, including the special municipalities, makes this a more consequential defeat than that election. (These figures are drawn from a presentation I gave at a Stanford roundtable on December 2; the slides from that talk are available here.)
It’s a little late for me to weigh in on the debate over why the KMT fared so badly—plenty of other people have done that already, and the impact is rapidly fading into the past as Taiwanese politics churns along. Instead, in this post I want to look forward and ask: what does the 2014 election tell us about future election outcomes in Taiwan, especially the 2016 presidential race?
2014 Is Not 2016
The unquestioned assumption in most commentary in Taiwan is that the KMT’s recent electoral rout bodes poorly for its chances in the coming presidential and legislative elections, now tentatively set for January 2016. Some commentators have argued that the 2014 result indicates a fundamental electoral “breakthrough” for the DPP, rather than a temporary shift away from the KMT due to recent scandals and the unpopularity of President Ma, and that the DPP should be the favorite going into 2016.
This is not self-evident. To see why, we need only look at the last time around. In the last local elections in 2009-10, the DPP’s candidates for county and city executives actually won more total votes than did the KMT: 5,755,287 to 5,463,570. That turned out not to presage a DPP victory in the presidential race in 2012: Tsai Ying-wen lost to Ma Ying-jeou 51.6% to 45.6%.
Why the big difference? One reason is simply that they were held at different times: Taiwan was in a major recession (as was much of the world) in 2009-10, whereas by 2012 economic growth had bounced back. Another is that the relative importance of factors affecting mass voting behavior in local elections is different from national ones: ideological positioning and the state of the national economy, among other things, are likely to play a stronger role in vote choice in 2016 than they did in the local elections. The personal qualities of the candidates matter, too, and there’s always the possibility of a third candidate emerging as a serious contender, as happened in the 2000 presidential election.
So, until we know who the candidates are, what platforms they'll run on, and how the economy is likely to be doing, we should be cautious about forecasting a win for either major party. Nevertheless, might the 2014 elections at least tell us something meaningful about the relative appeal of the DPP and KMT right now? If we assume all the other factors will cancel each other out, doesn't the last election tell us the DPP will enjoy a generic partisan advantage going into 2016?
Not necessarily, and the reason is turnout. In general, it's 10-15 percent higher in presidential elections than local ones. If these extra voters who show up at the polls in presidential elections disproportionately support the KMT, then the local results are going to give an underestimate of the KMT’s expected vote share in 2016. So it would be nice to know how much of the DPP's success is due to KMT-leaning voters staying home, versus the DPP winning more votes. To figure that out, we need to dig into the raw vote totals a little more.
The unquestioned assumption in most commentary in Taiwan is that the KMT’s recent electoral rout bodes poorly for its chances in the coming presidential and legislative elections, now tentatively set for January 2016. Some commentators have argued that the 2014 result indicates a fundamental electoral “breakthrough” for the DPP, rather than a temporary shift away from the KMT due to recent scandals and the unpopularity of President Ma, and that the DPP should be the favorite going into 2016.
This is not self-evident. To see why, we need only look at the last time around. In the last local elections in 2009-10, the DPP’s candidates for county and city executives actually won more total votes than did the KMT: 5,755,287 to 5,463,570. That turned out not to presage a DPP victory in the presidential race in 2012: Tsai Ying-wen lost to Ma Ying-jeou 51.6% to 45.6%.
Why the big difference? One reason is simply that they were held at different times: Taiwan was in a major recession (as was much of the world) in 2009-10, whereas by 2012 economic growth had bounced back. Another is that the relative importance of factors affecting mass voting behavior in local elections is different from national ones: ideological positioning and the state of the national economy, among other things, are likely to play a stronger role in vote choice in 2016 than they did in the local elections. The personal qualities of the candidates matter, too, and there’s always the possibility of a third candidate emerging as a serious contender, as happened in the 2000 presidential election.
So, until we know who the candidates are, what platforms they'll run on, and how the economy is likely to be doing, we should be cautious about forecasting a win for either major party. Nevertheless, might the 2014 elections at least tell us something meaningful about the relative appeal of the DPP and KMT right now? If we assume all the other factors will cancel each other out, doesn't the last election tell us the DPP will enjoy a generic partisan advantage going into 2016?
Not necessarily, and the reason is turnout. In general, it's 10-15 percent higher in presidential elections than local ones. If these extra voters who show up at the polls in presidential elections disproportionately support the KMT, then the local results are going to give an underestimate of the KMT’s expected vote share in 2016. So it would be nice to know how much of the DPP's success is due to KMT-leaning voters staying home, versus the DPP winning more votes. To figure that out, we need to dig into the raw vote totals a little more.
Was the DPP's Win a Result of Blue Voters Staying Home?
Let’s start with the basic numbers. Here are the turnout figures for 2012 and 2014:
Now, how about the partisan breakdown? Here's the vote totals for each party in 2012 (presidential election) and 2014 (county/city executives):
Notably, the DPP candidates (including Ko Wen-je) together polled almost 600,000 votes more than Tsai did in the 2012 presidential race, even as turnout declined! So while the KMT had a disastrous drop from 2012 to 2014, there was also a significant increase in support for the DPP in 2014 above and beyond its support in the presidential election. Clearly, this is not just a story about asymmetric turnout of each party's base supporters, with pan-Blue voters sitting this one out. Instead, the DPP appears to have made big absolute gains as well: the party's vote total in 2014 was only about 200,000 short of what Ma Ying-jeou won in 2012, in a higher-turnout election.
(For those interested in digging further into the numbers, I've put all these data in an Excel file, which can be accessed below):
Let’s start with the basic numbers. Here are the turnout figures for 2012 and 2014:
- 2012: 13,452,016 votes cast, or 74.4 percent of all eligible voters;
- 2014: 12,512,135, or 67.6 percent.
Now, how about the partisan breakdown? Here's the vote totals for each party in 2012 (presidential election) and 2014 (county/city executives):
- 2012: Tsai Ying-wen (DPP): 6,093,578
- 2012: Ma Ying-jeou (KMT): 6,891,139
- 2014: DPP candidates: 6,684,089*
- 2014: KMT candidates: 4,990,667
Notably, the DPP candidates (including Ko Wen-je) together polled almost 600,000 votes more than Tsai did in the 2012 presidential race, even as turnout declined! So while the KMT had a disastrous drop from 2012 to 2014, there was also a significant increase in support for the DPP in 2014 above and beyond its support in the presidential election. Clearly, this is not just a story about asymmetric turnout of each party's base supporters, with pan-Blue voters sitting this one out. Instead, the DPP appears to have made big absolute gains as well: the party's vote total in 2014 was only about 200,000 short of what Ma Ying-jeou won in 2012, in a higher-turnout election.
(For those interested in digging further into the numbers, I've put all these data in an Excel file, which can be accessed below):
Adjusting for Races without a DPP Candidate
There's one caveat to this conclusion, and it's a big one: the result in Taipei was quite anomalous. Ko Wen-je in Taipei ran as an independent and deliberately avoided associating too closely with the DPP during the campaign, and the KMT's candidate Sean Lien (連勝文) was a particularly poor nominee. In 2016, the DPP is not going to be able to replicate what Ko did and carry Taipei by over 200,000 votes. Given Taipei's size, we're clearly overestimating the DPP's probable support if we count all the votes for Ko in 2014 as likely votes for the DPP in 2016. On the other hand, there were several other counties where the DPP didn't run a candidate; the party will undoubtedly add some votes in these places in 2016. Any inference about 2016 depends among other things on the net effect among these jurisdictions.
To get a better sense of the size of this effect, I took out the votes from the five "oddball" jurisdictions where the DPP did not run a candidate: Taipei, Hsinchu County, Hualien, Lienchiang, and Kinmen. The comparison of vote totals in the other, "normal" jurisdictions is below:
So in the places where it ran a candidate, the DPP bested its 2012 vote total by over 500,000. That's especially impressive because there were double-digit declines in turnout from 2012 in New Taipei, Taoyuan, Tainan, and Kaohsiung. If the DPP candidate in 2016 can repeat the performance of the party's candidates in 2014, then 5.83 million votes is a conservative estimate of its vote total in these places in the next presidential election.
But what about the oddball places? Let's imagine that the DPP had run candidates in all these jurisdictions, and then assume that they performed as well on average as DPP candidates did elsewhere. In other words, assume that the increase in votes for the DPP in the oddball places would be proportional to the increase in the other, non-oddball places. That is:
DPP's net vote increase in normal jurisdictions, 2012 to 2014: 508,290
Total votes in normal jurisdictions, 2012: 11,246,356
Fraction increase: 0.045
Net increase in oddball jurisdictions, 2012 to 2014: X
Total votes in oddball jurisdictions, 2012: 2,107,949.
X is then 0.045*2,107,949, or 95,271 votes.
The Tsai campaign in 2012 won 771,762 votes in the oddball cases, so adding these up we get an estimate for 2014 of:
771,762 + 95,271 = 867,033.
Thus,
Non-oddball 2014 vote total: 5,830,106
Oddball 2014 vote estimate: 867,033
Estimated 2014 DPP vote total if candidates ran everywhere: 6,697,139.
So, in a hypothetical scenario in which the DPP ran candidates everywhere, the party's vote total for 2014 would be 6,697,139. That is just under 200,000 votes short of what Ma Ying-jeou won but about 600,000 more than what Tsai won in 2012. It's also higher than any DPP presidential candidate has ever won in the past--Chen Shui-bian's vote total of 6,446,900 in 2004 is the previous high-water mark for the party. For a "local" election with a turnout rate well below the last presidential election, that number is eye-opening. It's a clear indication that the DPP didn't win just because pan-Blue voters stayed home while pan-Green voters all showed up; instead, if you accept the calculations above, the DPP in effect captured more votes than it has ever won before, in any election, presidential, legislative, or local.
Generic Conditions Favor a DPP Win in 2016
Given that, the DPP should probably be viewed as a slight favorite to win the presidency in 2016 even under generic conditions--two high-profile, appealing candidates, a neutral economic environment, moderate ideological position-taking, and the absence of serious third-party challengers. Those are big "ifs": a lot can change over the next year. But it seems more likely that they will change for the worse rather than for the better for the KMT.
For one, while the DPP seems set to nominate Tsai Ying-wen again, the KMT does not have any obvious presidential contender waiting in the wings beyond Eric Chu. If he decides not to run, whoever the KMT nominee is will start at a serious disadvantage in name recognition and personal appeal. And if Chu does decide to run, he will probably need to put considerable distance between himself and the incumbent president in order to have a serious shot at winning. President Ma's approval ratings, and those of the Executive Yuan, have been consistently under 20 percent for most of his second term, giving the DPP the opportunity to frame the election as an anti-Ma vote as much as a pro-DPP one.
So, bottom line: unless there are major surprises over the next year, the 2014 election results suggest that Taiwan's next president will likely be from the DPP. For a party that has itself been on the receiving end of several electoral drubbings over the last decade, it's a remarkable political recovery.
There's one caveat to this conclusion, and it's a big one: the result in Taipei was quite anomalous. Ko Wen-je in Taipei ran as an independent and deliberately avoided associating too closely with the DPP during the campaign, and the KMT's candidate Sean Lien (連勝文) was a particularly poor nominee. In 2016, the DPP is not going to be able to replicate what Ko did and carry Taipei by over 200,000 votes. Given Taipei's size, we're clearly overestimating the DPP's probable support if we count all the votes for Ko in 2014 as likely votes for the DPP in 2016. On the other hand, there were several other counties where the DPP didn't run a candidate; the party will undoubtedly add some votes in these places in 2016. Any inference about 2016 depends among other things on the net effect among these jurisdictions.
To get a better sense of the size of this effect, I took out the votes from the five "oddball" jurisdictions where the DPP did not run a candidate: Taipei, Hsinchu County, Hualien, Lienchiang, and Kinmen. The comparison of vote totals in the other, "normal" jurisdictions is below:
- Tsai 2012 (minus oddballs): 5,321,816
- DPP 2014 (minus oddballs): 5,830,106
So in the places where it ran a candidate, the DPP bested its 2012 vote total by over 500,000. That's especially impressive because there were double-digit declines in turnout from 2012 in New Taipei, Taoyuan, Tainan, and Kaohsiung. If the DPP candidate in 2016 can repeat the performance of the party's candidates in 2014, then 5.83 million votes is a conservative estimate of its vote total in these places in the next presidential election.
But what about the oddball places? Let's imagine that the DPP had run candidates in all these jurisdictions, and then assume that they performed as well on average as DPP candidates did elsewhere. In other words, assume that the increase in votes for the DPP in the oddball places would be proportional to the increase in the other, non-oddball places. That is:
DPP's net vote increase in normal jurisdictions, 2012 to 2014: 508,290
Total votes in normal jurisdictions, 2012: 11,246,356
Fraction increase: 0.045
Net increase in oddball jurisdictions, 2012 to 2014: X
Total votes in oddball jurisdictions, 2012: 2,107,949.
X is then 0.045*2,107,949, or 95,271 votes.
The Tsai campaign in 2012 won 771,762 votes in the oddball cases, so adding these up we get an estimate for 2014 of:
771,762 + 95,271 = 867,033.
Thus,
Non-oddball 2014 vote total: 5,830,106
Oddball 2014 vote estimate: 867,033
Estimated 2014 DPP vote total if candidates ran everywhere: 6,697,139.
So, in a hypothetical scenario in which the DPP ran candidates everywhere, the party's vote total for 2014 would be 6,697,139. That is just under 200,000 votes short of what Ma Ying-jeou won but about 600,000 more than what Tsai won in 2012. It's also higher than any DPP presidential candidate has ever won in the past--Chen Shui-bian's vote total of 6,446,900 in 2004 is the previous high-water mark for the party. For a "local" election with a turnout rate well below the last presidential election, that number is eye-opening. It's a clear indication that the DPP didn't win just because pan-Blue voters stayed home while pan-Green voters all showed up; instead, if you accept the calculations above, the DPP in effect captured more votes than it has ever won before, in any election, presidential, legislative, or local.
Generic Conditions Favor a DPP Win in 2016
Given that, the DPP should probably be viewed as a slight favorite to win the presidency in 2016 even under generic conditions--two high-profile, appealing candidates, a neutral economic environment, moderate ideological position-taking, and the absence of serious third-party challengers. Those are big "ifs": a lot can change over the next year. But it seems more likely that they will change for the worse rather than for the better for the KMT.
For one, while the DPP seems set to nominate Tsai Ying-wen again, the KMT does not have any obvious presidential contender waiting in the wings beyond Eric Chu. If he decides not to run, whoever the KMT nominee is will start at a serious disadvantage in name recognition and personal appeal. And if Chu does decide to run, he will probably need to put considerable distance between himself and the incumbent president in order to have a serious shot at winning. President Ma's approval ratings, and those of the Executive Yuan, have been consistently under 20 percent for most of his second term, giving the DPP the opportunity to frame the election as an anti-Ma vote as much as a pro-DPP one.
So, bottom line: unless there are major surprises over the next year, the 2014 election results suggest that Taiwan's next president will likely be from the DPP. For a party that has itself been on the receiving end of several electoral drubbings over the last decade, it's a remarkable political recovery.