Suchergebnisse

To establish an unambiguous source of accountability, a semi-presidential constitution can either allow the president to dominate government formation and dissolve the parliament without a prior vote of no confidence being passed or it can reverse the arrangement of these powers. Accordingly, Taiwan is an unusual case of semi-presidentialism because the president can unilaterally appoint the premier but cannot actively dissolve the parliament, so the electorate is seldom called upon to evaluate the responsibility of the constitutional agents in a snap election. Vote-trading theory offers a reasonable explanation for this puzzling situation by showing how seemingly unconnected issues can be voted on as a package. In Taiwan, the choice of presidential powers was complicated by the sovereignty issue, leading the reformers of the constitution to deny the legislature the power to confirm the president's appointment of the premier in exchange for downsizing the Taiwan Provincial Government. This is exactly what vote-trading theory foresees: votes on different issues may be traded if no "pivot" finds the status quo to be his/her favorite option. By demonstrating how the linking of unconnected issues can obstruct institutional design, vote-trading theory expands our understanding of constitutional choice.

Politics always involves the exchange of resources for votes, but the mechanism differs according to the electoral institution. The principal-agent model identifies two necessary conditions for this exchange to be feasible: (1) the opportunity cost of preferential grants is small, and (2) agents receiving these resources play a vital role in helping the principal to win. These conditions were satisfied in the presidential election of 2004, when swing voters were critical in helping the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to retain the presidency and limited costs were attached to the resources demanded by legislators elected under the single non-transferable vole (SNTV) system. After 2004, the president no longer exchanged grants for votes at the national level because swing voters could hardly change the result of presidential elections while the opportunity cost of grants was raised by the plurality-tier of the mixed-member majoritarian (MMM) system. Nevertheless, resource allocation still dominates local politics. After MMM was introduced, DPP legislators elected in DPP-led regions distributed the resources that were helpful to consolidating potential supporters; those campaigning in KMT-administered areas, however, attempted to lure swing voters by providing them with extra services-just like what their local heads did. (Issues Stud/GIGA)

Why did the unified government led by Taiwan's president Ma Ying-jeou experience gridlock? In this article, I answer this question by modifying the veto player theory to explain how policies are made in Taiwan's semipresidential system, in which the president can unilaterally appoint a premier who is accountable to the national legislature. Given this constitutional design, the premier represents the president rather than the legislature, so the agenda setter is either the legislature or the president. A veto player model shows that the legislature, as a collective veto player, has the last-mover's advantage when it sets the agenda and that the two executive heads are more likely to be incongruent if a policy has to be deliberated by the legislature. The president sets the agenda only if he can discipline the legislators in his party and the legislature is not allowed to amend an executive proposal. This theory explains why policies involving lawmaking give Taiwan's Legislative Yuan considerable bargaining powers, even to the disadvantage of the president. These theoretical arguments are confirmed by hypothesis-based case studies and can be generalized to study other semipresidential regimes.

Electoral systems shape party systems by constraining voters' choices, but the choices voters make may also compel political parties to change the electoral system. Thus, an electoral system changes endogenously if the voters' choices it induces vary over time, and political parties are motivated by the voters' new choices to modify the electoral system. This article applies this logic to explain the change in the single non-transferable vote (SNTV) system. When SNTV fosters the formation of a dominant-party system, the ruling party needs to maintain steady economic growth so that enough resources can be turned into private goods to satisfy the majority of voters. But economic growth necessarily increases the anonymity of the voters, and hence the difficulty for the dominant party to garner votes using this strategy. The demise of one-party dominance and the shift in government power then urge some parties to replace SNTV with other electoral systems. This hypothesis is confirmed by the electoral reforms in Japan and Taiwan. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

Electoral systems shape party systems by constraining voters' choices, but the choices voters make may also compel political parties to change the electoral system. Thus, an electoral system changes endogenously if the voters' choices it induces vary over time, and political parties are motivated by the voters' new choices to modify the electoral system. This article applies this logic to explain the change in the single non-transferable vote (SNTV) system. When SNTV fosters the formation of a dominant-party system, the ruling party needs to maintain steady economic growth so that enough resources can be turned into private goods to satisfy the majority of voters. But economic growth necessarily increases the anonymity of the voters, and hence the difficulty for the dominant party to garner votes using this strategy. The demise of one-party dominance and the shift in government power then urge some parties to replace SNTV with other electoral systems. This hypothesis is confirmed by the electoral reforms in Japan and Taiwan.

Abstract: For decades, Japan and Taiwan had combined developmentalism with electoral competitions held under the single nontransferable vote (SNTV), a peculiar system responsible for their perennial one-party dominance. When the cost of maintaining this system became too high to bear, some politicians of the ruling party began to promote a mixed formula that assigns a high percentage of seats to be elected by first-past-the-post (FPTP), hoping to cultivate a new system that prolongs their political powers while the old regime is collapsing. This has happened in Japan in the past decade, and will most likely appear in Taiwan in the future.