Taiwan's Democracy

Economic and Political Challenges

Robert Ash, John W. Garver, Penelope Prime, Robert Ash, John W. Garver, Penelope Prime

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136672774
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: International Business
• Index: Business

Taiwan's rapid industrialization during the 1960s and 1970s, combined with the democratic revolution that began with the lifting of martial law in 1987 were of deep historic importance. Over the next decade Taiwan's "political miracle" matched its earlier "economic miracle" creating a vibrant liberal democracy complete with freedom of speech, association and assembly, rule of law, and competitive and fair multi-party elections. The continuation of these achievements and the new challenges that have surfaced are addressed in rich detail in the chapters of this volume by an international team of experts. One of the biggest such challenges is Mainland China's economic success, which has added to the complexity of Taiwan's economic and political policy options. A number of the contributors to this volume consider Taiwan's response to China's economic rise and show how Taiwanese companies have strategically taken advantage of the changing economic environment by moving up the value chain of production within Taiwan while also taking the opportunity to invest overseas.

With chapters covering a wealth of topics including:

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• Constitutional reform

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• National identity

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• Party politics

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• Taiwan's development model

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• Industrial policy

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• Trade and investment

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• Globalization

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• Sustainable development

Taiwan's Democracy will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Taiwan studies, Chinese politics and economics, international politics and economics, and development studies.

PART I

Constitutional debate
amidst political challenges

2

THE POLITICS OF
CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM IN
TAIWAN

Shelley Rigger

The constitution of the Republic of China took effect on December 25, 1947; the first substantive amendments were not added until 1991. In the intervening decades the ROC constitution's spirit was honored mostly in the breach, for its democratic elements were suspended in the wake of the Chinese Civil War. Since 1990, the constitution has encountered a new set of challenges, undergoing seven significant reforms: 1991, 1992, 1994, 1997, 1999, 2000 and 2005. How was it, then, that in 2007 – before the 2005 reforms had even taken effect – Taiwanese politicians were once again consumed by a rancorous debate over yet another round of constitutional change, potentially the most far-reaching to date?

Constitutional reform in Taiwan involves a wide range of political actors and forces. It includes both pragmatic and political calculations; constitutional reformers seek to address real issues of representation, deliberation, efficiency and accountability, but they are not above using constitutional debates to mobilize support for partisan political goals. The complexity of the issue has produced a great deal of debate and analysis, but little consensus.

Scholars generally divide Taiwan's constitutional reform process into stages, although there is disagreement about precisely how those stages should be defined (e.g. Linn 2002; Yeh 2002). This chapter considers the constitutional changes since 1990, as well as the current debate over constitutional reform. It follows the model developed by Lin Jih-wen, which regards the reforms of 1991, 1992, 1994 and 1997 – the “Lee Teng-hui Era” reforms – as manifestations of a single political dynamic. During this period, Taiwan updated and rejuvenated the ROC constitution to suit the needs and demands of a democratizing polity.

This first round of constitutional reforms had two objectives: facilitating democratization and balancing power among democratically elected governing bodies. In 1991, constitutional revisions restored the popularly elected nature of the ROC's legislative organs (including both the parliament, or Legislative Yuan (commonly referred to as “the LY”), and the National Assembly, whose purpose was to elect the president and amend the constitution). The following year's reforms gave voters the right to choose the provincial governor (the highest-ranking executive official below the central government). The 1994 reforms implemented direct popular election of the president and adjusted the relative power of the president and premier (the head of Cabinet, appointed by the president but accountable to the Legislative Yuan through a vote of confidence). The 1997 revisions reversed the 1994 reforms by eliminating the post of provincial governor; they also increased the power of the president relative to the premier and legislature.

The second round of reforms encompassed amendments passed in 1999 and 2000. In 1999, the National Assembly tried to preserve its institutional influence by changing the mechanism by which Assembly members were chosen while simultaneously extending the term of office of sitting members. Facing a fierce backlash from the public for its self-serving behavior, the Assembly reversed itself the following year. Its power to elect the president already had been handed to the people; now it transferred nearly all the rest of its powers to the Legislative Yuan. The reform reduced the National Assembly to an ad hoc body that would convene infrequently, only to ratify constitutional amendments already approved by the LY, or to vote on a bill of impeachment against the president. In considering the 1999/2000 reforms as a separate reform round, I part company with Lin, who considers all the Lee Tenghui Era reforms together. Looking at those two years’ peculiar events as a separate round helps clarify their logic, and helps bridge the gap between those reforms and the subsequent rounds.

The third round of constitutional reform was concluded in 2005, when the National Assembly ratified amendments that cut the size of Taiwan's legislature in half and changed its electoral system from single, non-transferable voting (SNTV) in multi-member districts to a combination of proportional representation and single-member simple plurality voting. The 2005 round also substituted popular referendum for a National Assembly vote as the mechanism for ratifying future constitutional changes and transferred its impeachment powers to the legislative and judicial branches. With nothing left to do, the National Assembly ceased to function.

The “fourth round” of constitutional reform is still in its infancy: while a wide variety of constitutional changes are proposed – including proposals for entirely new constitutions that would establish a “Second Republic” or a “Republic of Taiwan” – these are very far from ratification.

Explaining constitutional reform

Most writing on Taiwan's constitutional reform takes a normative or prescriptive approach; coming up with ways to improve the constitution is something of a cottage industry in law schools and political science departments (Yeh 2004; DeLisle 2004; Laliberté 2004). Analytical studies of the constitutional reform process tend to emphasize the importance of democratization (and democracy-minded leaders) as driving forces behind the reform process (Yeh 2002; Chao and Myers 1998). For example, Yeh argues that “the [pre-reform] regime's need to respond to crises has driven consecutive constitutional revisions. These crises came both from the regime's legitimacy in democracy (inward) and the regime's legitimacy in the international community (outward)” (Yeh 2002: 55). Other studies emphasize a related variable, partisan calculation (Copper 1998; Rigger 2001). Yet another popular academic approach is to contemplate the implications of constitutional reform for cross-Strait relations (Wachman 2004).

In 2002, Lin Jih-wen published a paper that placed Taiwan's constitutional reform process in a rational choice framework. He noted the popular view of the reform process which emphasizes “the struggle for power mingled with the debate of ideas, while calculated moves interwove capricious impromptus,” but he insisted that it was possible to analyze the process more systematically (Lin 2002: 144). He argued that existing accounts of Taiwan's reforms tended to take one of three approaches: institutional engineering, historical-structural (path-dependent), or bargaining. His article synthesizes insights from each of these approaches, but most strongly endorses the institutional bargaining approach developed by William Riker (1964).

According to Lin, Taiwan's 1990s constitutional reforms occurred in a two-dimensional issue space that defined the preferences of the four actors in the process (the Lee Teng-hui/mainstream faction of the KMT, the DPP, the KMT's non-mainstream faction and the New Party). Although the constitutional reforms involved seventeen distinct issues, Lin shows that the positions taken by the four political actors on these issues were associated with two underlying dimensions. By carefully examining their positions on the various issues relative to the pre-reform status quo, Lin locates each of the four players in the two-dimensional space.

The first dimension, which Lin labels the “ideological dimension,” captures the degree to which a party acknowledged the legitimacy of the ROC constitution. In the 1990s, the DPP regarded the ROC constitution as illegitimate and called for a new constitution; thus, Lin places the DPP at the extreme left end of the ideological dimension. The mainstream (Lee Teng-hui) faction of KMT, for its part, sought to “make Taiwan a de facto sovereign state, while keeping the fundamentals of the ROC Constitution intact.” Lin locates the KMT mainstream between the DPP and the status quo on the ideological dimension (Lin 2002: 145). The New Party and the KMT's non-mainstream (conservative) faction preferred to affirm and invigorate the ROC constitution, placing them to the right of the status quo on the ideological dimension.

The second dimension, which Lin calls the “power dimension,” captures each actor's position on the fundamental question of how to balance the power of the president and legislature. As Lin points out, parties that expected to win presidential elections (mainly Lee Teng-hui's KMT) supported constitutional reforms that increased presidential power, while the New Party, which had little hope of winning the top post, supported a more authoritative role for the legislature. As for the DPP, Lin says its interests prompted it to take a moderate position: “The DPP, although sharing the NP's criticism on the KMT's power expansion scheme, hesitates about restricting the president's power, because the possibility of their winning the presidential election is no longer remote. … [Nonetheless,] the DPP, although supporting a capable president, does not abandon the Legislative Yuan as an effective political arena” (Lin 2002: 142–143).

Having placed the parties within the two-dimensional issue space on the basis of their preferences, Lin explains the first round of constitutional reforms as a bargaining process. A key constraint on the parties’ actions was the requirement that constitutional amendments must receive a three-fourths majority in the National Assembly. The KMT mainstream held the required supermajority through the 1991, 1992 and 1994 reforms, so its proposals passed easily.¹ The 1996 National Assembly elections reduced the KMT's share of seats to 55 percent, while the DPP increased its share to 29 percent. As a result, additional reform required cooperation between the KMT mainstream and the DPP.

Because both the mainstream KMT and the DPP sought to change the status quo (while the non-mainstream KMT and the New Party sought to preserve it), a coalition of the Lee Teng-hui faction and the DPP was possible. To put it in the lingo of Putnam's two-level games, the two actors’ “winsets” overlapped: there were alternatives to the status quo that both actors preferred over the status quo (Putnam 1988). And because there were two issue dimensions, the DPP and KMT mainstream were able to trade votes on one dimension for votes on the other. The result was the 1997 constitutional reform. Most importantly, the Lee Teng-hui faction achieved its goal of blocking a requirement that the premier undergo legislative confirmation (a measure that would have transferred much of the president's executive power to the legislature), and the DPP was able to achieve its goal of radically diminishing the status of the provincial government, which was a long-standing ideological goal (Lin 2002: 149). Meanwhile, “No progress was made on the empowerment of the Legislative Yuan, about which the two parties held divergent opinions” (Lin 2002: 150). The result was a new equilibrium which placed the status quo between the preferences of the mainstream KMT and the DPP.

Lin makes two very important observations about this equilibrium: first, it “made further constitutional reforms unlikely” (Lin 2002: 155) and second, it was closer to the KMT mainstream's preferences than to the DPP's ideal (Lin 2002: 149). Additional reform was unlikely because since the KMT mainstream had achieved its goals, there was no room for further compromise. For its part, though, the DPP remained dissatisfied because the first round of reform did not move the status quo far enough toward its preferred position on the ideological dimension.² Because the DPP was weaker than the KMT (having barely half as many seats in the Assembly, and much less political support overall), only a partial victory was possible. But the DPP's dissatisfaction meant that the equilibrium, too, was only partial – and, as it turned out, temporary.

Lin's article does an excellent job of explaining the first round of constitutional reform. Its account of the second-round reforms of 1999 and 2000 is somewhat less convincing. In considering the second round, Lin correctly points out that abolishing the National Assembly was an ideological imperative for the DPP. Eliminating the National Assembly would fundamentally reshape the ROC constitution in a more democratic and Taiwan-centric direction. To gain control over the body (a first step toward killing it), Lin says, the DPP offered KMT Assembly members a “poison pill” – an extension of their term of office that was sure to provoke a strong negative response from the public, and from other elected officials. The KMT delegates took the pill, but they did not deliver the Assembly; to put it bluntly, the DPP strategy failed. Lin concludes that “the DPP seemed to have committed political suicide. But … so long as the DPP's leaders believed they had made progress on the ideological dimension, the price they paid became justifiable” (Lin 2002: 152). And in fact, just a year later, the DPP won the prize it had sought all along: the Assembly voted itself out of existence.

Lin's analysis is plausible, but I will offer a slightly diff...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Taiwan’s Democracy
• Routledge Research on Taiwan
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Introduction: Taiwan’s democratic consolidation
• Part 1: Constitutional debate amidst political challenges
• Part II: Economic restructuring in the global context
• Index