Taiwan's Democracy at Multiple Crossings

Abstract

Taiwan’s democracy has gone through significant changes recently, featuring surging clashes of generations, classes, and social values. The watershed moment came at the Sunflower Student Movement in 2014, manifesting the sharp dissidence of the youth generation regarding procedure and priority, and social values from the older generations. Until today, the youth movement in Taiwan still lasts and evolves around the ongoing political dynamics, displaying a strong partisan characteristic in the assessment of governance quality. In this chapter, the author first overviews Taiwan’s democratic development since 1996 by highlighting the issue of quality of governance. Next, a contextual discussion is given to defining the essential features of the youth movement and its connection to anti-establishment sentiment. Then a public opinion study based on the five waves of the Asian Barometer Taiwan Survey in the past two decades is presented. To what extent the partisan stance sways and drives the assessment of governance quality and the trust toward political establishment is then explored. This chapter concludes with a discussion on the future prospect of Taiwan’s democracy, particularly when the youth generation demographically replace the older generations as time goes on and become the mainstream population in the near future.