Why 'Taiwan is Too Democratic': Legitimation, Administration, and Political Participation in Taipei

Abstract

Located in an administrative government office and in a politically active neighborhood, this doctoral dissertation examines some of the parameters for political action in contemporary Taiwan by examining the everyday life of, and interactions between, a state institution and some of the people under its purview. The dissertation tacks between the two sites, but I emphasize the importance of bureaucracy as a vital site for the ethnography of the state. Taiwan’s democratization after forty years of martial law, for instance, has been completed on paper, but working out the implications of regime change continues to take the energy and innovation of the people concerned with the everyday implementation of state processes, including low-level government functionaries as well as politically active citizens. I also urge a vision of the democratic state as one (internally diversified) institution situated in a broad arena of competing and cooperating institutions: neither separate from its surroundings nor completely integrated into them, but, like other institutions, both distinct and diffuse.Despite their seemingly contrasting social positions, the arguments and self-presentations that government administrators and political activists relied on to justify and explain their positions revealed shared ideals of political life. These legitimating bases, through which political actors showed themselves deserving of support as well as of legal benefits, involved contributing to Taiwanese development and representing Taiwanese culture; long-term participation in relations with other political players; and a state of sincerity and well-meaning demonstrated in group cohesion and a willingness to seek consensus with others. The individualistic focus and abstract legalism of some notions of democracy, in contrast, suggested to my interlocutors a dangerous diversity and a breakdown in social norms, a government divided against itself, and a fragmentation of national identity that, in the context of Taiwan’s tenuous grip on de facto sovereignty, had potentially catastrophic implications. It also suggested recourse to impersonal and abstract principles -- laws, rights -- that had little traction in Taiwan’s political culture, where particularistic ties were not just the shady underbelly of political process but also an explicitly valorized way to constitute and express public interests. The theories and practices of democracy introduced over the last two decades have led to significant changes in Taiwan’s political life; but they also fit into sociocultural contexts that have helped shape the character of a specifically Taiwanese democracy. Other democracies, presumably, are equally specific.