Suchergebnisse

There is a debate over whether democracy is beneficial to female representation. Taiwan's experience supports Krook's (2013) contention that democracy may be necessary for gender quotas to produce sustainable female representation. Taiwan has employed gender quotas in single non-transferable vote (sntv) elections since the early 1950s, but this same system has had markedly different effects when embedded in different contexts. During the authoritarian era, female representation stagnated and the women who won often needed to invoke the reserved seat rule. After democratisation, women won larger seat shares and needed to invoke the reserved seat rule far less frequently. Parties were the critical actors, since with multiparty competition parties had an incentive to cultivate female political talent in order to prevent competing parties from winning seats at a discount. This paper analyses sntv electoral results in Taiwan from 1954 to 2014 in six different types of national and local elected assemblies.

The KMT's electoral defeat in 2016 was not a case of a dominant party crashing to defeat due to mismanaging its factions or ineptly allocating state resources. This article illustrates a third path by which dominant parties can lose power. The KMT lost because the underlying cleavage structure slowly shifted and eroded the KMT's political foundations over a quarter century. Indeed, the KMT had ceased to be a dominant party long before 2016; that election was merely a particularly dramatic step in what was actually a long decline. Taiwan has a single dominant political cleavage defined by national identity. Since the early 1990s, exclusive Taiwanese identity has gradually increased and eventually replaced both Taiwanese and Chinese identity as the majority disposition. As the cleavage line gradually shifted, the KMT tried to develop other appeals, but these were only successful as long as they did not directly clash with the dominant national identity cleavage.

Since inherited political resources may be inferior to personally accumulated resources, legacy candidates do best when facing mild competition, and shy away from intense competition. This is the first systematic empirical investigation of the extent of family politicians at both the national and local levels in Taiwan.

Relative to other countries in the world, Taiwan has consistently elected large numbers of women to political office. This paper argues that women have done well in Taiwan because of the reserved female seat system in SNTV elections and that the 2005 reform from SNTV to MMM did not produce further gains in gender equality. SNTV with reserved seats produces incentives for parties to cultivate large numbers of powerful women in order to ensure that other parties are not able to win cheap or free seats. Empirically, the evidence shows that women win significantly more votes and seats in districts with reserved seats than in those without them. Moreover, winning an SNTV election requires candidates to amass power resources, and the women who survive this arduous test have power that can be used for other political goals. Women elected on party lists do not necessarily accumulate as much power. The new MMM system has arguably not produced more female legislators than the old SNTV system would have, and it has reduced the aggregate power that women in the legislature can wield. (Issues Stud/GIGA)

There is widespread consensus on the theoretical foundations of the differing mandates hypothesis, that in mixed-member systems district legislators are more likely to defect from the party line than list legislators. However, the empirical evidence for this hypothesis is extremely weak. Is the hypothesis itself fundamentally flawed, or does the long list of intervening variables cited in the literature account for these weak results? This paper examines the differing mandates hypothesis in a case, Taiwan from 1993 to 2007, in which none of the proposed intervening variables should alter expectations. If the hypothesis is not supported in this baseline case, perhaps it should be discarded altogether. In fact, there is strong support for the hypothesis, indicating that the hypothesis is not fundamentally flawed, though it may be less robust than commonly believed. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

AbstractSNTV engenders incentives to vote strategically not only against probable losers but also against candidates seen as possible runaway winners. This paper uses survey and election data from the 2004 Taiwanese legislative election to argue that excessive strategic voting against the strongest candidates was at the root of coordination failures. Further, I argue that strong personal votes play a role in mitigating these failures by constructing a stable foundation of votes that is not subject to the wild swings produced by strategic voting.

In 'Making Punches Count', a comprehensive account of legislative floor violence and its consequences, Emily Bacchus and Nathan Batto focus on recent episodes from a wide variety of countries, including Turkey, South Korea, Taiwan, Ukraine, Mexico, Uganda, and others. What do cultures of legislative brawling tell us about the health of democracy in a given country? Are the brawls mere fits of passion, or is there a deeper logic at work? Bacchus and Batto argue that legislative brawls are, in fact, calculated acts that serve the interests of the legislators who engage in them. Beginning from the incentives driving lawmakers in different party systems and drawing on both signaling theory and theories of contentious politics, they develop a powerful explanation of why individual legislators choose to brawl.