Politics in Taiwan: Voting for Democracy (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Politics in Taiwan: Voting for Democracy John F. Copper (bio) Shelley Rigger . Politics in Taiwan: Voting for Democracy. London: Routledge, 1999. ix, 229 pp. Paperback $29.95, ISBN 0-415-17209-8. Politics in Taiwan: Voting for Democracy is a well-researched, well-written, and perceptive treatise about the democratization of the nation we call Taiwan (officially known as the Republic of China but called "Taiwan Province" in Beijing). It is unique in that the author focuses almost exclusively on elections and the election process, which, she argues, more than other contributing factors engendered the impressive democratic change that has made Taiwan a model of political modernization. Rigger, in fact, views elections as the independent variable or the cause of democratization, rather than the dependent variable or the product of political modernization in the direction of democracy. (Most scholars treat the electoral process as a dependent variable.) Her approach lends itself to a noticeably more penetrating analysis than most books on Taiwan's politics. Its disadvantage is that the reader is not provided with much analysis of other factors—such as Taiwan's land reform, its rapid economic development, and Western influence—that also contributed to democratization. Although one might find fault with Politics in Taiwan for being too narrow in focus, this has its upside in that, in the mind of this reviewer at least, it gets to the heart of the matter of democratic change. The book begins with a comparative-politics style of analysis, which Rigger employs to explain to the reader why elections are so important and why in some cases they almost single-handedly produce democracy. Her model is Brazil, where the holding of elections became so important that they drove the country to democratic reform. She contends that this is also what happened in Taiwan. Not completely excluded are Taiwan's cosmopolitan history; the democratic promises made by the Nationalists, who carried Sun Yat-sen's legacy with them to Taiwan after they were defeated by the Communists in China in 1949; constitutionalism; economic modernization; and so forth. These, she argues, in fact help to explain why, before elections began to have an unstoppable impact, the system was a "mobilizational authoritarian" one, or a system that one might say was waiting for reform. But these factors, she suggests, are tangential to explaining why Taiwan democratized (which, had there not been elections, might have been delayed for years, perhaps indefinitely), and especially why it did it so with such rapidity and why it was so successful. Rigger further explains that the regime never opposed democratic elections, as one might think it would have since elections threatened the "old order." Early on, Taiwan's political system protected or at least insulated the top leadership by separating local and national politics. The state of war also justified martial law [End Page 212] and a "go slow" attitude toward political change. Finally, the single, nontransferable voting in multi-member districts made it possible for the ruling party to incorporate or control potential opposition politicians. By the time top government and ruling party leaders realized that this was not enough, it was too late to stop the momentum of democratization. Refining the argument, the author states that from 1945, when Taiwan reverted to the Republic of China, up until 1972, when Chiang Ching-kuo began democratic reform, the system was a clientalist state (a term used by many scholars) in which the ruling party (the Nationalist Party or Kuomintang, KMT) governed the county in an authoritarian manner. While it propounded constitutionalism and espoused a democratic ideology, it did not tolerate new political parties, it ruled through military and police control, and it created and manipulated interest groups. However, the regime needed elections to gain legitimacy. Also, Chiang Ching-kuo wanted to bring Taiwanese (an "ethnic" group or subgroup of Chinese that migrated to Taiwan from China beginning several centuries ago) into the system dominated by mainland Chinese (those who moved to Taiwan after World War II and mostly after the Nationalists were defeated by the Communists in 1949). Elections were the best way to do both, and thus the electoral process became central to democratization. At first...