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On the first electoral defeat of the age-old Kuomintang (KMT) in the year 2000, many predicted its disintegration. However, as the 2004 election unfolded, many forecast its triumphant return. This article identifies the key institutional factors that have kept the defeated party from becoming defunct, and the strategic choice that the KMT leadership has made for its political recovery. The party pursued a reform strategy before forging a pact with like-minded parties, and reestablished its leadership among the alliance of political opposition parties. Lacking a vision and unable to confront the most salient political issue in newly democratized Taiwan, the KMT is suffering an identity crisis and struggling to be a party of the present and the future.

Although quite a few third-wave democracies in Southern and Central Europe became consolidated within a decade of their origin, all of those in East Asia are still fragile and fledgling. Ever since South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and the Philippines embarked on democratic transition or restoration more than a decade ago, elections have been regularly held, and democratic competition is widely considered the only path to power. Rough edges remain, however. Rules are stretched, even bent. Political stalemate tends to delay, if not prevent, timely policy action. And public cynicism toward underperforming, if not malfunctioning, democracy in these four polities is so pervasive and unnerving that pundits warn against a crisis of governance in East Asia's new democracies.

Under an electoral system of single nontransferable vote
(SNTV) with multiple-seat districts, each voter can cast only
one vote and only for one candidate, surplus votes cannot be
transferred between candidates, and seats go to those candi-
dates with the plurality of votes. Initially crafted by Japanese
oligarchs in 1900, this unique system was continuously em-
ployed for Japan's lower house elections till 1995, with a brief
interlude during the Allied occupation. The SNTV system
has been in use in Taiwan since World War II and was
adopted in Korea during the Fourth and the Fifth Republic
(1973­88). It is ironic that academic interest in this electoral
system should increase just when it is being abandoned in its
birthplace, Japan, in a fin-de-siecle political act that also
ended political dominance of the ruling Liberal Democratic
Party (LDP).