Organizer: Ya-Chen Chen, Clark University, USA Chair: Cal Clark, Auburn University, USA Discussants: Bih-Er Chou, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan (R.O.C.); Janet Clark, University of West Georgia, USA The diversity of Taiwanese political dynamics is enthralling, and the sources of what (en)genders it are complex in terms of national identity, ethnic disputes, gender gaps, partisan structure, policy-making, elections, economic development, socio-cultural systems, diplomatic relations, and even ecological concerns throughout history. This panel not only traces and highlights but also diversifies and problematizes the dynamics of Taiwanese politics from the Japanese, Russian, and Mainland Chinese socialist influence in the early 20th century all the way to the power struggles between the Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in the 21st century. In this panel, Cal Clark and Alexander C. Tan collaborate to examine the authoritarian practice of strong leadership, formal constitutional design, relationships among governmental institutions as well as the logic of the electoral system. Ya-chen Chen points out both the realistic and literary/fictional records of the early Taiwanese Communist feminist, Xie Xuehong (Hsieh, Hsueh-hung), by balancing between Chen Fang-ming’s Taiwanese studies perspective and Li Ang’s viewpoint of literary creative writing and feminism. Janet Clark analyzes the factors that impact women’s participation in Taiwanese politics. Tsuey-ping Lee scrutinizes the Taiwanese enterprise-led system and details problems of the Western environmental voluntary agreement in Taiwan.
While somewhat delayed, Taiwan’s very successful democratic transition created a seeming “political miracle” to go with the nation’s earlier “economic miracle.” Yet, democracy, as desirable as it was, did not solve all of Taiwan’s political problems. For example, the development of a fairly even balance of political power between the Kuomintang and the Democratic Progressive Party led to growing gridlock and partisan polarization and growing emphasis upon the highly divisive national identity issue; and democratization may have even enhanced corruption by creating the need for huge campaign funds and by politicizing more aspects of policy-making. Institutionalist theory argues that fairly permanent economic structures and policy-making arrangements create “institutions” which shape future policy-making and economic performance to a considerable extent. Two such institutional legacies stand out in Taiwan. First, the government had long been dominated by strong authoritarian leaders; and second, the electoral system of a single vote in multi-member legislative districts was fairly rare. The first half of this paper discusses the institutional imbroglio created by these dynamics. Here, we will examine how the authoritarian practice of strong leadership contradicted the ROC’s formal constitutional design and muddied the relationships among the country’s major political institutions, creating problems that still reverberate through the governmental system. The logic of the electoral system will also be discussed to show how it created incentives for what turned out to be fairly counterproductive political behavior. The second part then presents a case study of the politicization of the financial industry as an illustration of these problems. Finally, the conclusion briefly considers the strengths and weaknesses of Taiwan’s government in view of these perils of democracy.
Chen Fang-ming started his research on Xie Xuehong (1901-1970), the Taiwanese feminist communist, early in the 1980s, and his book on Xie Xuehong in 2000 inspired Li Ang, a well-known Taiwanese feminist writer, to create a biographical fiction about Xie Xuehong. This conference paper aims to establish a bridge between Chen Fang-ming and Li Ang in terms of their publications about Xie Xuehong. This conference paper includes a valuable interview with Chen Fang-ming and records Chen Fang-ming’s first-handed voices as Li Ang’s inspirer, reader, and literary critic. In addition to Chen Fang-ming’s academic research as a grassroots Taiwanese scholar and Li Ang’s feminist creative writing famous for the courage to depict sexuality, Chen Fang-ming brings in Academia Sinica’s forthcoming publication of Russian scholarly interpretation of Xie Xuehong’s role as a Taiwanese feminist communist in Russia.
Women can use government and the political processes in two distinct ways in order to improve their status. First, women officials are usually assumed to be especially responsive to women’s concerns and issues. Thus, having more women officials should result in more governmental policies supportive of women. Second, women’s groups and individual women can lobby public officials to gain favorable policies. Indeed, the activities of grassroots women’s organizations have been quite effective in upgrading the status of women in a wide range of contexts in both the developed and developing worlds. This paper, hence, examines how these two processes have affected women’s political status on Taiwan. Both of these factors have made important contributions to improving women’s political position in Taiwan. A key institution that stimulated women’s office holding was the “reserved-seats” system that guaranteed that women would hold about a tenth of the legislative seats in the country. This allowed women to hone their political skills and to become more politically prominent and powerful over time. Women’s organizations and interest groups also became much more influential after the country’s democratization, building on a tradition of women’s social organizations that were historically important even with Taiwan’s patriarchal Confucian culture.
In recent decades, instead of employing the traditional mandate-and-control approach in the field of environmental governance, an approach based upon voluntary partnership and mutual commitments between government and enterprises has been emphasized. The voluntary approach was regarded as a cost-effective way to reach the goals of energy conservation and emission reduction. However, when this approach, which was developed in Europe and has worked well there, is applied to the unique political, economic, and social contexts of Taiwan, its applicability requires reexamination.
This article intends to gain insights on the factors leading to performance of environmental voluntary agreements (VAs) in Taiwan and the reasons why those driving forces that work well in Western countries tend to be ineffective in Taiwan. To do this the author relied on the assessment of three environmental VAs based upon a coherent evaluation framework taking into account three different dimensions along signing and implementing VAs-- the incentives of government and enterprises for signing VAs, the critical factors for successful VAs, and the performance of VAs. Incentives are examined because motivation plays a critical role in implementing VA policy in Western countries but similar incentives do not necessarily exist in the unique Taiwan context. The other two evaluation dimensions regarding critical factors for success and VA performance are based upon the assessment framework built by De Clercq and Bracke (2005). The former includes application, impact, and resource development while the latter include criteria for assessing the institutional-economic context and the specification of agreement.
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While somewhat delayed, Taiwan’s very successful democratic transition created a seeming “political miracle” to go with the nation’s earlier “economic miracle.” Yet, democracy, as desirable as it was, did not solve all of Taiwan’s political problems. For example, the development of a fairly even balance of political power between the Kuomintang and the Democratic Progressive Party led to growing gridlock and partisan polarization and growing emphasis upon the highly divisive national identity issue; and democratization may have even enhanced corruption by creating the need for huge campaign funds and by politicizing more aspects of policy-making. Institutionalist theory argues that fairly permanent economic structures and policy-making arrangements create “institutions” which shape future policy-making and economic performance to a considerable extent. Two such institutional legacies stand out in Taiwan. First, the government had long been dominated by strong authoritarian leaders; and second, the electoral system of a single vote in multi-member legislative districts was fairly rare. The first half of this paper discusses the institutional imbroglio created by these dynamics. Here, we will examine how the authoritarian practice of strong leadership contradicted the ROC’s formal constitutional design and muddied the relationships among the country’s major political institutions, creating problems that still reverberate through the governmental system. The logic of the electoral system will also be discussed to show how it created incentives for what turned out to be fairly counterproductive political behavior. The second part then presents a case study of the politicization of the financial industry as an illustration of these problems. Finally, the conclusion briefly considers the strengths and weaknesses of Taiwan’s government in view of these perils of democracy.
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