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?  

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 American Political Science Association's Conference Group on Taiwan Studies (CGOTS) has posted its call for papers. CGOTS is one of APSA's "related groups" organizations. Founded in 1990, it serves to promote Taiwan studies in the broader political science community, as well as to foster connections between Taiwan-based and U.S.-based scholars with substantial research interests in Taiwan. 

For applicants with a Taiwan-related proposal, submitting to CGOTS can substantially improve one's chances of acceptance to the conference. The formal call for papers is reposted below; the deadline to submit applications is December 1, 2014. 

My new column at Ketagalan Media is on electoral reform in Taiwan, and what form it should take:

Read the whole thing here.

On October 17-18, 2014, the Taiwan Democracy Project will put on our annual conference on Taiwan's democracy. This year's theme is the politics of polarization. The conference is free and open to the public; you are encouraged to register at the official event page, here. The formal announcement is below.

What motivated President Ma to attempt to expel Wang Jin-pyng from the KMT last September? One possibility is that Ma was genuinely troubled by the compelling evidence in the influence-peddling case brought against Wang, and saw the revelations as a moment to take a stand against corruption within the KMT’s legislative caucus. It’s hard to square this theory with the inconsistent reaction of Ma to other cases of scandal in the KMT, though, as this blog post by Frozen Garlic notes.

Another possibility is that the dispute was personal. There’s ample evidence of a long-running Ma-Wang rivalry that goes back at least to the party chairman’s election in 2005, when Ma trounced Wang with over 70 percent of valid votes. As Ma prepared to run for president, Wang declined an invitation to run on the ticket as Ma’s vice president. So there may be some lingering animosity from this history. But this story isn’t very convincing, either. For one, savvy politicians rarely let personal feelings get in the way of political strategy—and those that do tend not to last in politics very long.

I think the answer lies elsewhere. If we think entirely in strategic terms, stripped of emotion and morals, there are two institutional reasons why Ma might have viewed Wang Jin-pyng in his role as speaker of the Legislative Yuan as a major impediment to his agenda, and thus sought to replace him with a more pliable figure.

1. Wang chairs the Cross-Party Negotiation Committee. The Cross-Party Negotiation Committee (in Chinese: 黨團協商, 政黨協商 or 朝野協商) is the body charged with resolving inter-party conflicts over legislative procedure. As this article details, it was created in the late 1990s in an attempt to reduce uncertainty and increase legislative efficiency, which had been disrupted by “wildcat” protests by opposition legislators. It came into force in 1999, the same year that Wang Jin-pyng became LY speaker, so its role is inextricably intertwined with Wang’s stewardship as the head of the legislature. 

As far as I have been able to tell, the CPNC is not well understood, even among Taiwanese political scientists who specialize in legislative politics. The basic rules (detailed here) are: 

• Every party caucus (which requires a minimum of 3 members) is allowed one representative, typically the party caucus whip.  
• The CNPC meets at the discretion of the LY Speaker; in practice this happens whenever there's a boycott or blockade in the legislature, which has happened at least 80 times in this LY.
• Discussions are supposed to be recorded or otherwise made public; this rule is blatantly and routinely violated.
• Any legislative action agreed to by all party representatives in the CNPC will not be opposed by individual members of each caucus, allowing for expedited reviews, votes, or other legislative actions.

I've not been able to identify any consensus about the ultimate effect the CPNC has on the conduct of legislative business. At one extreme, the CPNC could be working to formalize a minority party veto over all legislative action. That is, because all parties have to agree in the CNPC, even the smallest parties (the Taiwan Solidarity Union right now has only 3 members) could effectively block controversial legislation by withholding agreement in the committee.  That would require virtually everything to pass with the consent of all parties--an alarmingly high threshold for policy change.

At the other extreme, the CPNC could just function as a more formal version of the informal discussions that take place all the time between different parties in the legislature, and give no extra meaningful authority in practice to opposition parties.

The conversations I've had with people at the legislature suggest that the CPNC looks a lot more like the second situation than the first: to the extent negotiations in this body are meaningful, it is because the opposition parties are able to do things outside the CPNC to block majority action on legislation. And if negotiations in the committee actually were on the record, as the statute requires, the party leaders would simply move them out of that committee and somewhere else private.  Thus, the CPNC is not really the place where the president's agenda goes to die. If President Ma thought getting rid of Wang would gut the CNPC and streamline legislative action, he had the wrong target in mind.

2. Wang does not use police force to end opposition blockades.  Rather than in the Cross-Party Negotiation Committee, the opposition's power to block ruling party legislation lies primarily in its ability to occupy the speaker's podium, and thus to prevent legislative sessions from being gaveled in. As I noted in the previous post, this type of action is something like a filibuster, and it is not absolute; the KMT caucus ended one of these blockades by physically removing opposition legislators from the podium prior to the passage of ECFA in 2010. The inability of the KMT to repeat that success in recent months is probably because of dissension within the majority party caucus itself, rather than anything the opposition is doing differently.

A shoving match is not the only way the majority party could counter an opposition party blockade of the speaker's podium, however. The Speaker also has the authority to call in the LY's security force to restore order. As this article describes, the "sergeant at arms" power (警察權) has been used a total of six times, all before 1992 when the legislature was fully democratic (i.e. the majority of legislators were still permanent representatives of mainland China):

• 1988.12.06: DPP legislators objecting to the continued presence of permanent unelected "Eternal Legislators" (萬年立委) try to grab the microphone from the speaker, Liu Kuo-tsai (劉闊才), starting a fight. Liu calls in the police and throws the DPP legislators out of the chambers.
• 1989.07.04: As a protest against the unelected legislators, DPP legislator Wu Yung-hsiung (吳勇雄) stands at the presentation podium (發言台) and refuses to budge. Speaker Liu calls security personnel in to have him removed from the chamber.
• 1990.05.29: Hau Pei-tsun, the sitting Minister of Defense and a retired military general, is nominated to be the next premier by President Lee Teng-hui. During the confirmation hearing, the DPP criticizes the nomination, calling Hau the head of a new “military cabinet” (軍人組閣). (Until 1997, premiers had to receive LY confirmation before taking office.) During the confirmation vote, a physical altercation breaks out between KMT and opposition LY members, and Speaker Liang calls in security to restrain the opposition.
• 1990.11.06: DPP members are unhappy that Speaker Liang permits Premier Hau to give perfunctory answers to legislators (“敷衍兩句“). A fight breaks out while Hau's remarks are being read into the official record, and Liang again calls in security to quash the opposition’s protests.
• 1990.12.18: Upset at the KMT caucus's sudden change to the legislative agenda, the DPP caucus starts a group protest, and DPP legislator Wei Yao-kan (魏耀乾) unplugs the microphone while Speaker Liang is attempting to start the session. For the third time in a year, Liang calls in security personnel, who struggle to restrain DPP legislators and restore order. 
• 1991.04.12: The best-known incident: DPP legislator and future premier Chang Chun-hsiung (張俊雄) approaches Speaker Liang at the podium, hands him a letter of protest, and then without warning lightly slaps him, telling him that this is a “wake-up call” from the Taiwan people. Furious, Liang orders security into the chamber. DPP legislator Lu Hsiu-yi (盧修一) rushes to defend Chang, ends up injured at the bottom of the scrum with the police, and is sent to the hospital. A few moments of the confrontation can be seen in the video accompanying this news story.

Given these precedents, then, during any of the dozens of times the opposition parties have occupied the podium over the last year, Wang could have used this power to have them removed. And this presumably would have allowed action on everything on President Ma's agenda, including the Cross-Strait Services in Trade Agreement. So in a strictly legal sense, Speaker Wang has not used every weapon in his arsenal to ensure legislative action on executive priorities. He is allowing the opposition to block legislation without consequences. From Ma's perspective, then, a speaker more sympathetic to the president's agenda could use this power to end opposition blockades--thus, in all probability, the attempt to get rid of Wang. 

Ma Might Think Getting Rid of Wang Will Tame the Legislature. It Won't.
If we view the Speaker's authority over the legislature in its historical context, the picture is not nearly so simple. First, the sergeant-at-arms power has never been used in the democratic era. Taiwan today is a strikingly different place from Taiwan in 1991: most obviously, all legislators are subject to direct elections now. Calling in the police would be the political equivalent of dropping a nuclear bomb on the legislature. The opposition would no doubt go all-out to resist a police action in the legislative chambers and to play up the violence and drama, and the image of security forces dragging out opposition legislators would attract not only blanket domestic news coverage but probably also a great deal of opprobrium from abroad as well. 
 
It's also just not Wang's style--he's been able to survive as speaker in large part because he's viewed as a fair-minded and consensus-oriented leader, one of the few people who is well-connected and respected among both political camps. And even if Wang were in theory willing to entertain the idea, the fate of the last speaker to call in the police should give him pause: Liang Su-jung lasted barely over a year in the position before he had to resign. 

It's conceivable that, had Ma succeeded last September in expelling Wang from the party and creating a vacancy for the speaker's office, a Ma ally could have been installed in the position--someone like the KMT caucus whip Lin Hung-chih (林洪池). But he would face the same basic dilemma: he doesn't have the internal party unity to win a showdown with the DPP, and using the police to remove opposition legislators would impose a huge political cost. I'm skeptical that the KMT caucus would agree to bear that cost, or that they would support a nominee for speaker who was willing to impose it. 

Thus, removing Wang Jin-pyng from the Speaker's position was not likely to change the underlying situation much. Even if it had succeeded, I think Ma's attempt to purge Wang was a serious strategic miscalculation, and indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of how the legislature works.    

Legislative Yuan Politics: Tyranny of the Minority?
For the last year, the fight over the Cross-Strait Services in Trade Agreement (CSSTA, or Fu-Mao for short) has taken center stage in Taiwanese politics. Although Fu-Mao has been the top policy priority of the Ma administration since it was signed June 21, 2013, it remains under review by the Legislative Yuan. Improving the prospects for Fu-Mao passage was probably the primary motivation behind the attempt to expel Legislative Yuan Speaker Wang Jin-pyng from the KMT. The opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and its nominal ally, the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU), devoted much of their time working to slow the review process in the legislature, from initiating a physical confrontation in the LY over how the agreement would be reviewed, to demonstrations in hearings, to using parliamentary tricks to upset committee sessions. By the time Chang Ching-chung (張慶忠), the convener of the Internal Administration Committee, unilaterally announced that Fu-Mao had passed the committee in the now-infamous "30-second review" on March 18, 2014, the agreement had already languished for nine months.

The apparent success of the pan-Green parties in blocking Fu-Mao, despite not holding anything close to a majority in the legislature (the DPP and TSU together have only 43 of 113 seats, or 38%), suggests at first glance that a highly motivated minority can exercise de facto veto power over all legislative business. How you feel about that probably depends on your view about cross-Strait trade agreements: -pan-Blue types (i.e. pro-KMT) tend to think of this as a "tyranny of the minority" and a terrible affront to the democratic principle of majority rule, while pan-Green types like to characterize it as a heroic, nation-saving stand in the face of a ruling party captured by Chinese interests. But if we step away from the particular issue of Fu-Mao, and think about what's best for Taiwan's democracy in the abstract, allowing minority parties an effective veto over anything they don't like is troubling. 

Imagine if the partisan roles were reversed. In fact, let's take a DPP dream scenario: say, a hypothetical President Tsai Ing-wen taking office in 2016, and enjoying a newly elected pan-Green majority in the legislature, attempts to win legislative approval for a special budget to purchase a new arms package just approved by the U.S. Then imagine the opposition pan-Blue parties, despite controlling only a minority of the seats, effectively blocking this proposal, as they did several times (with a majority) during the Chen Shui-bian administration? If you're a pan-Green supporter, you're very quickly going to change your tune about minority party rights and heroic boycotts and blockades, no?  So, if minority parties really are able to exercise a de facto veto in the legislature, that does not bode well for coherent policy change in a place whose political elites are highly polarized over anything to do with cross-Strait relations. You're effectively stuck with the status quo.

Eventually, Speaker Wang worked out a procedural compromise in which the opposition DPP was allowed to offer amendments to each ECFA article, and the KMT then voted them all down, before the full bill was passed on August 17. This worked out okay for everyone: the DPP got a face-saving way to yield to the KMT majority, which was going to pass the bill one way or another; the KMT caucus got to avoid more fights on the floor; President Ma got ECFA approved; and Wang got to play peacemaker. 

If you think about it a bit, these kinds of physical confrontations shouldn't happen very often. They impose a cost on everyone: they attract a lot of negative media attention to the institution (including from CCTV in China!), people get hurt, etc. So there's an incentive for all sides to work out a compromise that precludes a public confrontation on the floor. The reason this doesn't happen all the time, I would guess, is uncertainty: neither party knows just how credible any given threat is by the KMT to initiate a confrontation in the LY and end a blockade. In the ECFA case, the July 8 showdown ended any uncertainty that the KMT would be able to mobilize its caucus to defend the speaker and end the blockade of the podium--in other words, that almost all KMT legislators supported ECFA and were willing to do whatever it took to get it passed. Once that became common knowledge, the DPP had only symbolic options left, like walking out of the legislative session in protest and getting an article-by-article vote it knew it would lose.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place (進退兩難): For KMT Legislators, Fu-Mao is not ECFA
So that brings us back to Fu-Mao, the Cross-Strait Services in Trade Agreement (CSSTA). If the KMT managed to get ECFA through the legislature in six weeks in 2010, then why wasn't it able to do the same for Fu-Mao in 2013? Nothing fundamental has changed in the legislature: the KMT lost some seats in the last election, but the party still has a significant majority (64/113, or 57%), even discounting the four additional legislators from the People First Party and Non-Partisan Solidarity Union who in general have voted with the KMT. The DPP and TSU are still quite solidly in the minority.

What has changed is public opinion, both toward President Ma and cross-Strait trade relations. When ECFA was signed in June 2010, Ma's public approval rating was about 47%--not great, but reasonably high given that Taiwan's economy was recovering from a severe recession that began almost as soon as he came into office.  Public support for ECFA was also positive: a TVBS survey in May 2010 found 41% of respondents approved of signing the agreement, while 34% disapproved.

By contrast, shortly after Fu-Mao was signed in June 2013, TVBS found public opinion running against the agreement, 47-30%, and Ma's approval rating at only 13%, with an astounding 73% of respondents disapproving of his performance, an all-time high. This was before any of the events of the subsequent year, including the Ma-Wang fight and the Sunflower Movement.

Given these polling numbers, it's not hard to see why support for Fu-Mao in the KMT caucus might have been a lot weaker than the party elites wanted to admit. Not only did legislators have to worry about all the criticism coming from industry groups and constituents within their districts. They also had to worry about the electoral consequences of taking a public stand in favor of an unpopular trade agreement with China, while going out on a limb for an even more unpopular president who's spent most of his time in office keeping them at arm's length. But Ma is still the party chairman, and has repeatedly indicated he's willing to discipline KMT members who don't toe the party line on this issue. That's the definition of being stuck between a rock and a hard place (進退兩難). 

So then the DPP comes along and blocks the speaker's podium, and dissenting KMT members have an escape hatch: publicly say nothing so as not to violate party dictates, but privately avoid being anywhere near the legislature when it comes time for a show of force to get the DPP to stand down. It's not a coincidence that there was another major showdown at the speaker's podium on June 25, 2013, shortly after Fu-Mao was signed on June 21. This one did not go so well for the KMT, or at least for Ma's allies: after six hours of altercations, the parties agreed to an extensive item-by-item review of Fu-Mao, against the wishes of the Ma administration. Buried in the news reports of this confrontation are two revealing differences with ECFA. First, the KMT leadership itself started the standoff by ordering legislators to try to secure the speaker's podium at 6:30am, to preempt pan-Green legislators who were planning to do the same. Second, they failed, in part because there were many fewer KMT legislators present than in 2010--note the failure to block off the back door. I'm willing to bet there are a few KMT members who were secretly thrilled with this outcome, because it got them off the hook from having to support an unpopular agreement or else face party discipline.

Although it passed mostly unnoted in the Taiwanese media, last week marked the one-year anniversary of the (failed) attempt by President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) to expel Legislative Yuan Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) from the KMT. It has also been about a year since I started blogging regularly on Taiwanese politics, so the Ma-Wang fight featured prominently in my first posts.  At the time, I hadn’t paid much attention to intra-KMT politics or executive-legislative relations, and I quickly realized there was a lot I didn't understand. My working assumption had always been that because the KMT controlled a comfortable majority in the legislature, and President Ma was the chairman of the KMT, he could probably get most of what he wanted approved there. 

The sudden attempt to purge Speaker Wang suggested that executive-legislative policy-making was more complicated, and more interesting, than I had supposed. And the slow, foot-dragging review of the Cross-Strait Services in Trade Agreement (CSSTA) (兩岸服務貿易協議) --"Fu-Mao" for short--in the legislature put the lie to the idea that President Ma could ultimately wield control over the KMT to get executive priorities passed.  It eventually became clear that these two events were probably linked: that Ma's strike against Wang was motivated at least in part by his frustration with the slow pace of action on the CSSTA in the legislature. 

All this happened well before a procedural dispute sparked the student protest and occupation of the legislature that became known as the Sunflower Movement. Thus, while the student protests were unexpected and dramatic, and attracted a huge amount of foreign and domestic media attention, their main political achievement so far is to have reinforced the pre-existing stalemate between the legislature and the executive. The focus on the light and heat generated by the Sunflower Movement has, I think, obscured this fact: the legislature as an institution is a formidable and powerful opponent of the executive. 

In posts over the next few days, I'm going to elaborate on this claim, along with some thoughts on what it means for Taiwan's democracy. In particular, I think the events of the last year have demonstrated four things:

1. The Legislative Yuan matters more than ever for policy-making.
2. The KMT legislative caucus is the primary obstacle to presidential priorities--not the DPP, the Cross-Party Negotiation Committee, or Wang Jin-pyng.
3. President Ma thought removing Wang Jin-pyng would solve his problems with the legislature. It won't.
4. The Ma administration doesn't understand the politics of the legislature very well.

Separate posts will follow.

For most of Taiwan's postwar history, policy-making was highly centralized in the Executive Yuan and the KMT itself. The Legislative Yuan, by contrast, was mostly a talking shop that rubber-stamped government budgets and initiatives. That began to change with democratization, but it's been a slow process. Even today, the annual budget proposal is drafted by the executive, and the legislature is prevented from adding new spending--the only way for legislators to affect this process directly is to cut funding, or freeze funds once they've been appropriated.

Nevertheless, the legislature has steadily accumulated authority at the expense of executive ministries over the last two decades. The ability of opposition party legislators to make life tough for executive branch officials became especially apparent in the later years of the Chen Shui-bian administration, when a pan-Blue (KMT-PFP) alliance held a relatively unified majority of the seats in the LY. Legislative committee inquisitions of ministers were common, key bureaus had budgets cut or frozen for transparently partisan reasons, and much of the government's proposed legislation (with key exceptions) was blocked. 

At the time, the standoff between the two branches appeared due almost entirely to the intensely partisan atmosphere that prevailed from 2004-2008. Thus, when Ma Ying-jeou won the 2008 election and the KMT won over 3/4 of the seats in the LY, most observers expected executive-legislative relations to become much more cordial and cooperative again. And for Ma's first term, they seemed to be improved, although even then there were complaints about LY "inefficiency" at passing high-priority legislation.

But legislative independence has reemerged with a vengeance in Ma's second term, even though the KMT remains the majority party there. What is so striking about the events of the last year and more is that even in a period of "unified" party control of both branches, the LY has prevented a quick passage of the president's top policy priority--the CSSTA--and may have killed it for good. That is not an outcome that I would have predicted in 2012, when Ma was re-elected. 

From a systemic perspective, what's potentially more troubling is that the current situation is about the best a governing party in Taiwan could ever hope for: the KMT controls the presidency and a majority in the legislature, and the president is the chairman of the party. The unity of purpose across the branches should be highest in this scenario. If a president can't get his agenda approved by the legislature under these circumstances, when can he?