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?

First, in the figure above I've broken out unemployment level by age cohort, focusing on the two key "youth cohorts" (I've left out the 16-19 category, which can be misleading given that many people are not actively looking for work at this age). It's striking how much higher youth unemployment is than overall unemployment, which by international standards is quite low at about 4%. By contrast, unemployment in the 20-24 year age cohort is more than triple that, at near 13%.  Equally interesting, and easier to miss, is that the gap between the young cohorts and the rest has also increased over the last 14 years: that difference was a factor of two in 2000, but a factor of over three in 2014. This figure gives us some sense of why the forceful opposition to the cross-Strait Services in Trade Agreement (CSSTA) included so many students: they've done proportionately worse over the last decade and more, even as the total labor unemployment rate has returned to a level near what it was a decade ago. 

Second, the figures above show GDP change in several economies to which Taiwan's is often compared.  The presentation is a little messier than I'd like, but one can still get a good sense of how Taiwan's economy has performed in relative terms over the last 30 years.  

What's especially striking to me is the recent comparison with South Korea. The narrative of the Ma campaign in 2008 was that Taiwan's economy had drastically underperformed and was losing ground. By contrast, the data above show that, at least using GDP growth rates, Taiwan's growth was higher than Korea's for five consecutive years, from 2003-2007. (The economic shock that hit all of East Asia in 2008-09 originated in the United States, so it's hardly fair to blame either Chen Shui-bian or Ma Ying-jeou for the deep recession that followed.) But that generally positive story about the Chen years (2000-2008) gets turned into this (from the KMT's party website):

That is, the KMT is attempting to lump the entire eight years of the DPP presidency together, in which the gap between Taiwan and South Korea narrowed, and contrast them with the increasing rates of the subsequent Ma administration. At best, that's an incomplete picture, as the data in the first two tables demonstrate. While the gap narrowed, it did so during Chen's first term, not his second. And the increase in the Taiwan-Korea gap during the Ma years is due entirely to a giant spike in 2010, when Taiwan's economy rebounded much faster from the recession than did Korea's.  

One other point: this is a pretty rudimentary comparison. Average per-capita income growth can also be misleading, in that rapid income growth among a small elite can move the whole average up. (In fact, that is what appears to have happened: as this article notes, average wages for salaried workers are about the same as they were in 1998, adjusted for inflation.) It would be nice to see median salary, and even better, a comparison of income inequality and its cousin, wealth inequality, measured various ways over time. 

The first of these, income inequality, is shown in the figures below.

The last two figures show income inequality measured two different ways: as a Gini coefficient, and as a ratio of the top 1/5 to bottom 1/5 of all households. The pattern in both graphs is similar: Taiwan's income inequality was on a pretty steady upward trajectory from 1980 until 2000, then it leveled off.  (The spikes are during the recessions of 2001 and 2008-9, when unemployment jumped, driving income inequality higher during these periods.)  

This picture is surprising given the narrative in the media about rapidly increasing inequality in Taiwan--so surprising I'm not entirely sure what's going on here. I suspect using income instead of wealth is painting a much better picture of inequality than actually exists on the ground. For one, capital gains and real estate gains are not treated like ordinary income for tax purposes in Taiwan--if a household's wealth gains come mostly from these sources, then they are potentially classified as low-income! For another, the use of quintiles in the comparison above, rather than five percent margins (as reported in this article), or even something smaller like comparing gains to the top 1% or top 0.1%, would probably paint a starker contrast.  At any rate, worth investigating further, given how prominent this issue is becoming in public discourse in Taiwan.  Grist for a future post...

Democracy in a Divided Society: East Asia in Comparative Perspective
An Asian Barometer Workshop
Organized by Program for East Asia Democratic Studies, IAS-NTU
Co-Sponsored by the Asian Democracy Research Network and 
Center for Democracy, Development and Rule of Law, Stanford University
Taipei, Taiwan, August 10-12, 2014

This workshop seeks to examine the functioning of democracy in divided societies by bringing together leading scholars from Asia and the United States. In particular, the workshop will focus on the politics of polarization: how it erodes or cripples young democracies in Asia and how we might mitigate its damaging effects. The on-going political crisis in Thailand and Taiwan timely reminds us how fragile young democracies can become when the push comes to shove. Most East Asian young and emerging democracies suffer from politics of polarization to some extent, including Mongolia, South Korea, Taiwan and Malaysia. In a broader context, this problem has become epidemic as riot police trying to ward off angry demonstrators in Ukraine and Turkey. While the focus is on East Asia, our colleagues from the United States will help us to cast the regional experiences in comparative perspective. Some of our paper contributors will use data from the Asian Barometer Survey (ABS Wave III) as this cross-national data base provides rich source for individual-country investigation and for region-wide comparative analysis. Other contributors might employ historical, institutional, cultural or structural approaches to tackle the issue. We encourage innovative ways to combine survey data with macro-level factors, such as institutional design, culture, ethnicity, religion and class structure. We hope to evoke synthesis about the impact social division on the functioning of democracy and identify the institutional designs and compensating measures to moderate the tension. All country studies are encouraged to address some institutional arrangements, electoral institution or government structure, and other socioeconomic measures which could moderate or exacerbate the conflicts.

On Wednesday, May 7, 4:30-6:30pm in Green Library at Stanford, Dr. Lant Prichett of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University will deliver the Hsieh Memorial Lecture.  Like the Liang Memorial Address given at Stanford last week, this annual lecture honors a former governor of the Central Bank of Taiwan, Dr. Sam-chung Hsieh (謝森中), who held that position from 1989-1994. The official event page can be found here. The abstract for Dr. Prichett's talk is below.

UPDATE: The video of this event is now available online, here.