Social Movements in Taiwan's Democratic Transition

Linking Activists to the Changing Political Environment

Yun Fan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780415720724
• eBook ISBN: 9781317961642
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Process
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Examining the relationships between activists and the changing political environment, this book analyzes the trajectories of three major social movements in Taiwan during the country's democratic transition between 1980 and 2000. In doing so, it explores why the labor and environmental movements became less partisan, while the women's movement became more so.

Providing a comparative discussion of these critical social movements, this book explores key theoretical questions and presents a rich and comprehensive analysis of social activism during this period of Taiwan's political history. It focuses on causal mechanisms and variation and thus avoids the tautological trap of finding an "improving" political opportunity structure wherever a social movement is flourishing. Drawing on extensive data from over 140 activists' demographic backgrounds, the discussion also builds upon existing studies of the "biographical" aspects of contention. This study then asks further questions about how certain tactics are chosen, not only how a repertoire of contention comes to have the shape it does.

Combining both a theoretical and an empirical approach, this book will be useful to students and scholars of Taiwanese politics and society, as well as social movements and democracy more generally.

1 Introduction

How do activists matter?

Together with the working masses, the Marxist… the vanguard of the proletariat, will lead the people along the right road, toward the victorious dictatorship of the proletariat, toward proletarian not bourgeois democracy.

—Vladimir Lenin, What Is to Be Done? 1902

Lenin and his Bolshevik comrades might have been wrong with their prediction that socialism could be achieved at any time and any place. But they were right about one thing: the crucial role of activists in social change. Lenin’s emphasis on the role of the Bolshevik Party, as the vanguard of the proletariat, in the process of working-class mobilization solved the problem of collective action of Marx’s theory. In the past 20 years, scholars studying social movements and contentious politics have benefited from Lenin’s wisdom as they started to study the role of activists in building and shaping social movements. However, the relationship between activists and the changing political environment has not yet been examined systematically. This book is devoted to understanding how activists matter in Taiwan’s social movements. By comparing the distinct trajectories of the labor, environmental, and women’s movements during Taiwan’s democratic transition, I aim to spell out the linkage between activists and the changing political environment.

Structure versus activists

For almost half a century, sociologists and political scientists have used the concept of political opportunity structure to account for the emergence of social and political movements and their potential to affect policy change. Tarrow (1994, 85) defines a political opportunity structure as “consistent—but not necessarily formal or permanent—dimensions of the political environment that provide incentives for people to undertake collective action by affecting their expectations for success or failure.” Political opportunity structure and its relationship to movements have been at the center of their intellectual agenda, especially for social movement scholars (Eisinger 1973; Tilly 1978; McAdam 1982; Kitschelt 1986; Tarrow 1989; Rucht 1996; Clemens 1997; Goldstone 2003; Porta and Tarrow 2005; McAdam and Boudet 2012; Ancelovici, Dufour, and Nez 2016; Porta 2018). Although this conceptual framework has produced a large number of insights and testable hypotheses, it does not adequately explain why political opportunity structure affects individual social movements differently.

As McAdam and Tarrow (2010, 529) aptly put it, “We worried that the canonical approach, including our own work, was overly focused on static categories (e.g., political opportunity structure, organizational resources, movement frames), giving too little attention to the mechanisms that connect contention to outcomes of interest.” Thus, the study of social movements has moved beyond comparing political opportunity explanations to other possible explanations for movement outcomes. Researchers are beginning to examine which aspects of opportunity affect social movements and how.

The reason that social movement studies cannot fully explain why changing political opportunity structures influence social movements differently is partly because they fail to pay enough attention to the role of activists. This tendency prevents scholars from investigating the dynamic linkage between activists and changing political opportunities, which, I argue, are crucial in understanding the causal mechanism that accounts for the variations in intersections between social movements and political environments.

As the title of this book suggests, Linking Activists to the Changing Political Environment focuses on activists and their dynamic relationship to changing political environments. By showing how activists can be linked to the shifting structures of political opportunities in Taiwan’s democratic transition, this book aims to investigate the interactions between social movements and changing political opportunity structures, from authoritarian regime to liberalized electoral politics.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Taiwanese society underwent a rapid political transformation that caught the attention of the entire world. One of the political novelties that changed the Taiwanese political landscape was island-wide social upsurges and movements that began before the mid-1980s. Looking back at the labor, environmental, and women’s movements before, during, and after the democratic transition almost two decades after these social upheavals occurred, we notice a puzzling phenomenon: the trajectory of the women’s movement contrasts strongly with that of the labor and environmental movements. While the labor and environmental movements went through a transition from partisan to nonpartisan, the women’s movement went from nonpartisan to partisan politics. Why would social movements under the same political opportunity structure have such strikingly different interactions with the changing political environment? Why did some social movements go through a transition from partisan to nonpartisan during Taiwan’s democratic transition from the 1980s to the 1990s, while some underwent the opposite transition, from nonpartisan to partisan? Why were the trajectories of their intersection with changing political opportunity structures so strikingly different?

In exploring this empirical puzzle, this book investigates the aforementioned theoretical concern for social movement scholars: what sorts of movements are affected by external political opportunity and how are they affected? By studying three different movements going through the same period of rapidly changing political opportunity structure, this book seeks to shed light on this important question.

Research design is an important element in addressing the questions that concern social movement researchers. They use two main methods: longitudinal study of a particular social movement and cross-national, or cross-sectional, comparative study of analogous movements in different political contexts. McAdam’s (1982) study of the US civil rights movement successfully traced the temporal and sectoral variations in political opportunity and how, combined with other factors, it contributed to the rise of black people’s collective actions. To some extent, his work served as a model for subsequent longitudinal case studies (Meyer 1990; Costain 1992; Cooper 1996; Rucht 1996). However, some scholars later argued that the core elements of political opportunity might operate differently for different types of claims. The single-movement longitudinal approach obviously cannot offer answers for such an inquiry.

The cross-national comparative framework, which has recently been used by many scholars to pursue cross-country generalizations, traces analogous movements in different countries and examines differences in political opportunity structures to account for the cross-national variation in the “protest potential” of given cases. However, by focusing on the differences between political opportunity structures, this framework is easily trapped by tautology and fails to map out the causal mechanisms accounting for the variable intersections between social movements and political opportunities. Consequently, researchers reemphasize the importance of variations in political opportunity to account for variations in the relationship between social movements and their political environment among countries, or those concerned with different kinds of movements come up with different kinds of causal mechanisms that cannot be compared.

This book proposes that a longitudinal study of numerous social movements under one changing political opportunity structure can shed light on unsolved theoretical and empirical questions about the causal mechanisms accounting for the relationship between social movements and changing politlcal opportunity structures. On a theoretical level, this book will show that the reason studies on social movements have failed to explain why changing political opportunity structures influence social movements differently is because they paid little attention to the role of activists. This tendency prevents scholars from investigating the dynamic linkages between activists and changing political opportunities, which are crucial in understanding the causal mechanism that accounts for the variations in intersections between social movements and changing political environments. I propose a microfoundational approach that addresses this failure by focusing on the influence of activists on organizational repertoires, tactics, issue choice, ideological transformation of movements, and ultimately the interplay between social movements and structures of changing political opportunity.

The case of Taiwan: transition from authoritarianism to democracy

A longitudinal study of numerous social movements under one changing political opportunity structure will shed light on the unsolved theoretical questions that this book seeks to answer. As case studies, social movements in Taiwan’s democratic transition offer some lessons for comparative politics scholars.

Taiwan is an island located in the Western Pacific, about 100 miles from China’s Fujian Province. Taiwan was populated by aboriginal peoples until the seventeenth century, when it became a Dutch colony. Soon afterward, a wave of Han Chinese loyal to the Ming Dynasty arrived, led by Cheng Cheng-kung. The Han successfully expelled the Dutch colonial force, and in 1683 Taiwan was taken over by the Ching Dynasty from mainland China. Taiwan changed hands again in 1895, after the Sino-Japanese War. It was ceded by the Ching Dynasty to Japan and was a Japanese colony for the next 50 years. Following Japan’s defeat in World War II, Taiwan was handed over to the Republic of China in 1945. The émigré ruling regime, the Nationalist Party (the Kuomintang—KMT) governed Taiwanese society for more than half a century by what may be described as authoritarian clientelism.¹

Martial law was declared in 1950 and not lifted until 1987. During this period of political repression, Taiwan underwent industrialization and experienced rapid economic growth. Beginning in the late 1970s, a political opposition movement, mainly supported by ethnically native Taiwanese, began to gain broader support through street protests. The KMT’s suppression of protests only garnered more support for the activists. The opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), founded in 1986, became the ruling party after winning the presidential election in 2000. It remained in power for eight years. The KMT returned to power in 2008 and ruled for another eight years. In 2016, the DPP was restored to power again, taking control of both the government and the congress for the first time. After two rounds of party turnover, Taiwan finally became a consolidated democracy. Chapter 6 will describe Taiwan’s political evolution since 2000 in greater detail.

From 1980 to 2000, Taiwan underwent a rapid political transition from an authoritarian regime toward democracy. Political democracy is defined here in classic procedural terms: free and fair electoral contestation for governing offices based on universal suffrage, guaranteed freedoms of association and expression, accountability to the rule of law, and civilian control of the military. Democratization is defined as the process of movement toward these conditions, while the consolidation of a democratic regime requires fulfilling all of them. Regimes thus can be in transition to democracy—further along than liberalization—but still fall short of a democratic threshold. By the end of 1999, Taiwan still lacked fair electoral contestation for governing offices, complete accountability to the rule of law, and civilian control of the military.

In spite of the vast body of literature accounting for the emergence of electoral competition and democratic transition, researchers rarely explore whether and how Taiwan, a society long governed by authoritarian clientelism, has evolved into a citizen society. Furthermore, the dynamics of the political transition toward respect for social rights is still not well understood.

If democracy is something more than elections, then there must be more to democratization than to a transition to elections. How do subordinated people like workers make a collective effort to claim the social rights and identities they feel entitled to, and thus facilitate a political transition toward respect for other fundamental democratic rights and democratic elections? How has Taiwan’s gender equality movement been able to help push Taiwan, an emerging democracy, to become the first country in Asia to approve marriage equality, while also achieving a record 38% women representatives in the Legislative Yuan (congress)—a feat that established Western democracies like the United States and the United Kingdom cannot equal? How does a society make the transition from clientelism to democracy? What resources and ideologies do they use to organize themselves and then pursue the social rights, as well as the identities, that they feel entitled to? Examining the trajectory of social movements in Taiwan’s democratic transition will help us account for these phenomena.

This study does not intend to answer all of the above questions directly. But by investigating the emergence of social movements and their trajectories before, during, and after Taiwan’s political transition, this book will shed light on some theoretical questions raised in social movement literature and on the role of social movements during Taiwan’s transition toward democracy during the 1980s and 1990s.

Most studies of Taiwanese social movements are of single cases of protest, like Reardon-Anderson’s 1997 Pollution, Politics, and Foreign Investment in Taiwan: The Lukang Rebellion, or of one dimension of a social movement, like Chen Peying’s 2004 Acting Otherwise: The Institutionalization of Women’s/Gender Studies in Taiwan’s Universities. There are also longitudinal studies of a single movement, like Ho Ming-sho’s (2006) book on the environmental movement. Such studies contribute to our nuanced understanding of single protest or social movement, but they don’t clarify why, in the same political environment, in the same society, movements develop different strategies and distinct trajectories. To understand this, we need comparative studies of social movements.

Teresa Wright’s (2001) comparative study of student movements in China and Taiwan in 1989 and 1990 does help us to understand the differences in activists’ strategic choices. However, her research method of studying the same movement in two different countries under different political opportunity structures is destined to conclude that the political opportunity structure is the determining variable of the result of the movement, although she does devote attention to the network effect and student leadership. As Meyer and Minkoff (2004) observe, it would be tautological to compare the same movement in two societies or countries.

A decade later, avoiding the methodological tautology, Liu Hwa-jen (2015) boldly compared two distinct movement sequences of labor and environmental movements in Taiwan and South Korea. She argues that the maturation and success of each of the four movements rely on unique combinations of the so-called movement power: labor movements have the power of economic leverage, whereas environmental movements depend on the power of ideology. Her book answers the question of why social movements appear at different times in a nation’s development. But if movement power is the determining factor in a movement’s trajectory, how can we explain the diverse trajectories of women’s movements in East Asian counties? Do they only reflect the combined effects of movement power and the environment of gender politics? This book will show that how activists interact with the changing political environment and their choice of organizational strategies and tactics play important roles in shaping movement trajectories. Based on a rich foundation of Taiwan studies, this book aims to not only map out the role of social movements during Taiwan’s democratic transition empirically but also further explore unanswered theoretical questions about the relationship between activists and political environments.

The activist approach

Most studies of social movements that deal with political opportunity structures analyze large-scale patterns of social movements, and often apply cross-national comparative frameworks. A problem in many of these studies is the tension between studying the particularity of the political opportunity structure and establishing generalizations about the causal mechanism at work. This problem would be simplified and made more tractable if the individual compositions and behaviors were analyzed.

All investigations that use a political opportunity approach are inherently historical, because only by a historical process of growing over a long period of time can movements reach the size needed to produce macrosociological effects. The tension between studying the particularity of the political opportunity structure of countries and establishing generalizations about the causal mechanism at work between political opportunity and social movements. As a result, researchers place different emphasis on the particular mechanism.

This dilemma is not only a matter of idiosyncratic scholarly variation. It is inherent in the approach used. There is no easy way to balance a generalizing fact against a particularizing fact. All historical cross-country comparisons confront this dilemma, which means that all macrosociological research is flawed in trying to wrest generality from factors that have obvious, causally crucial historical particularities. A macroscopic structure of political opportunities as well as movements consists of the behaviors of hundreds or th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: how do activists matter?
• 2 Linking activists to changing political opportunities
• 3 From “political man” to “class man”: the ideological transformation of the labor movement leadership
• 4 Activists’ shifting involvement from the environmental movement to electoral politics
• 5 The women’s movement: from politics without parties to politics with parties
• 6 New opportunities and new challenges: social movements after 2000
• 7 Conclusion
• Appendix: notes on duration data analysis
• Bibliography
• Index