Suchergebnisse

While Taiwan continues to enjoy a liberal, consolidated democratic regime, citizen discontent continues to be directed at regime, government, and the governing. Identifying the scope and degree of dissatisfaction is an initial step in ascertaining whether discontented citizens might be more or less amenable to destabilizing change at the regime level or more procedural changes at the government levels. Taiwan's 2004 elections topped off four years of mud slinging, legislative gridlock, and a number of serious battles over constitutional jurisdictions and powers. This research note compares survey items from the Taiwan Election and Democratization Study (TEDS) surveys taken in 2001 and 2003 to measure levels of support for a democratic regime and governance within this environment. As party and ethnic identification are key cleavages on Taiwan, this study seeks to establish the relative strengths of the association between partisan and ethnic identification and attitudes towards regime and government. The main findings are: (1) dissatisfaction with regime and governance are more strongly associated with partisan identification than ethnic identification; (2) there exists a surprisingly low satisfaction and commitment to democracy; and (3) alienation from government exists at a moderate level. (J Contemp China/GIGA)

Institutionalized parties and party systems have traditionally been viewed as necessary conditions for democracies to function effectively. Although this area of research is germane to all democracies, most analyses have been divided by regional investigation. Seeking to bridge the gap, this article applies concepts and measures of institutionalization from the study of Latin America to Pacific Asia's two most prominent cases of democratic transition, South Korea and Taiwan. An effort is made to apply the approaches of Dix and Mainwaring and Scully on party and system institutionalization in Latin America to South Korea and Taiwan. Cross-national comparison reveals a curvilinear relationship between institutionalization and consolidation. Taiwan's path to consolidation has been predicated on a pattern very similar to those taken by Latin American cases, whereas South Korea, theoretically, should not be as close to consolidation as it is.

Parties instrumentally shape or realign electoral support in competitive elections to underpin a vigorous party system. Assessing whether parties are strategic versus ignorant, then, is essential to the viability of the parties and particularly relevant in emergent democracies to eliminate unfounded biases against ignorant parties. The dramatic, lopsided results of Taiwan's 2008 legislative elections following electoral reform are particular useful in this regard: they suggest that the Kuomintang's Pan Blue coalition was strategic while the Democratic Progressive Party's Pan Green coalition failed to be strategic. We contradict this, using simulated electoral results and a strategic interaction model. This paper makes three contributions: first, it adds to a limited literature that considers parties influence, particularly parties' strategic actions. Party-centric explanations are rare so that when results are highly disproportionate, the question of whether party choices are strategic versus ignorant adds an important dimension to clarifying how the party realigns electoral support or influences political development. Second, through multiple methodologies – simulated electoral results, a game-theory strategic interaction model, and reports on-the-ground in Taiwan – the results show that parties' expectation of the other camp's strategy informed party choices, i.e., parties were strategic. Third, in revealing how parties were strategic, the paper reveals the basis of continued vitality of parties in Taiwan and other emergent democracies to broaden treatments in assessing party viability

With the 'third wave of democratization', South Korea joined the democracy club in the late 1980s. Although electoral performance and the party system have changed since the transition to democracy, there has been little systematic examination of the changes. In this article, we conduct an empirical test after developing a theoretical argument about why democratization leads to change. Before democratization, the manipulation of electoral laws and the urban–rural cleavage dominated Korean elections. After democratization, the electoral rules stabilized and opposition parties were given a fair chance to win the election. However, the average life of political parties shortened because of regionalism and personalism. There is now reason to believe that personalism may be set to diminish, thus encouraging authentic structural cleavages to emerge and shape Korean party politics in the coming years.