Abstract
Fighting “corruption” is a major issue for countries around the world. Countries will develop different “anti-corruption” systems according to their own customs, cultures and institutions. Nevertheless, since the public’s trust in government correlates significantly with transparency in government, anti-corruption has become the common concern for democratic countries. In this article, I adopt the concept of historical institutionalism and political analysis of law, analyzing the legislative process and evaluating the implementation outcomes of Taiwan’s anti-corruption system to figure out the difficulties in expanding government transparency and to reinterpret the political history of Taiwan after democratization. I examine the definition of the Anti-Corruption Act and the other four Sunshine Acts . I evaluate the implementation outcomes by analyzing the data provided by the Judicial Yuan, the Ministry of Justice and the Control Yuan to highlight the problems of the current anti-corruption system. I think that the results of the Anti-Corruption Act, the Act on Property-Declaration by Public Servants, the Act on Recusal of Public Servants Due to Conflict of Interest, the Political Donations Act and the Lobbying Act fail to meet the society’s expectations. This is because the political parties safeguarded their own interests during the legislative process, leading to the titular Acts. Also, outdated articles were included, making the laws hard to enforce. According to the data, the conviction rate of the Anti-Corruption Act is low. Besides, grassroots politicians, such as county and city councilors, township chiefs and township councilors, constitute the majority fined for breaching the four Sunshine Acts, while the original targets are excluded. Furthermore, the supervision bureau encounters manpower shortage arose from heavy workloads . These phenomena show that Taiwan’s anti-corruption system exists in name only. Therefore, we need to evaluate the feasibility of the anti-corruption system following the concept of institutionalism and process evaluation. I look forward to the day when politics in Taiwan comes to the sunshine . Keywords: Sunshine Acts, Anti-Corruption Act, political analysis of law
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