1 Taiwan’s Green Parties
Alternative politics in Taiwan
On January 25, 2016, the Green Party Taiwan (GPT) celebrated its twentieth anniversary. This made it the fourth oldest party that has regularly contested elections after the Kuomintang (KMT), the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the New Party (NP). With its roots in a range of Taiwanese social movements, the GPT fits well into the category of a movement party (Ho and Huang 2017).
For much of the campaign for the January 16, 2016 elections, it looked like the GPT could finally break through and win its first seats in the national parliament, the Legislative Yuan. The party had been building momentum since coming fifth in the 2012 party list component of the Legislative Yuan election. In the years following, it had won its first seats in local assemblies in 2014 and run its best funded and organised national election campaign in 2016. The fact that its core issues of nuclear power and LGBT rights were high on the public agenda, and that public opinion had shifted towards the GPT’s positions in recent years, all boded well for the party’s prospects on January 16. Moreover, it was contesting the elections in alliance with the newly formed Social Democratic Party (SDP), a party with a number of high-profile candidates.
By the time the GPT’s birthday arrived on January 25, it is unlikely that much organic champagne was drunk. When the results were announced on January 16, the mood in the party was one of disappointment and bitter recrimination. Though the party’s vote share had increased from 1.7 to 2.5 percent, it was well short of the 5 percent threshold needed to be allocated parliamentary seats. In contrast, it was another movement party, the New Power Party (NPP), that successfully entered parliament with five seats, becoming the third largest party. What made it all the more galling was that the NPP was less than a year old on voting day. By employing a range of social movement-linked appeals, the NPP had attracted the same kind of voters that the GPT had been targeting. Moreover, the NPP even poached potential GPT candidates. For instance, the GPT had decided to nominate Kawlo Iyun Pacidal (高潞 · 以用 · 巴魕剌) and had her nomination photograph taken, but before this was announced, she opted to jump ship and accepted the nomination of the NPP.
In this book, I tell the story of the first 24 years of the GPT’s history, from its establishment through to the aftermath of the most recent national elections in January 2020. Therefore, the book is located in the study of niche and, in particular, ecological parties. The vast majority of this literature has focused on cases of European Green Parties, so I hope that this first book-length study on an Asian Green Party will contribute to our understanding of global ecological parties. Do the theories and frameworks designed to explain European niche parties, for instance, translate well to an Asian context?
Much of my research on Taiwanese political parties can be summed up in terms of ‘how,’ ‘why’ and ‘so what?’ This book is no exception, as it revolves around a small number of core questions. Firstly, I am interested in the overall impact of the party, both in terms of its electoral performance but also its policy goals and international engagement. This is my ‘so what?’ Secondly, I examine the topic of party change. This is defined by Harmel and Janda as ‘any variation, alteration, or modification in how parties are organized, what human and material resources they can draw upon, what they stand for, and what they do’ (1994, 275). In other words, I aim to track how the party has adjusted its issue emphasis and campaign strategies over time – its changing human face and organisation. These are the ‘how’ questions. Lastly, I have three ‘why’ questions. I will discuss how to explain the formation of Taiwan’s Green Parties. Additionally, I am interested in understanding why the party has adopted its changing issue and campaign strategies, as well as how to explain the party’s changing electoral fortunes. Therefore, even though this is a detailed, single-party study, it uses the case as a means to engage with some of the central questions in global party politics and, especially, the niche parties literature.
Origins and case selection justification
Why did I end up writing a book on Taiwan’s Green Party? I often stress the importance of case justification to my students, so I ought to say a few words on this. Following the GPT’s failure to enter parliament in 2016, quite a few people suggested I ought to drop the project and go back to something more mainstream. As is often the case in most research projects, there are a mixture of personal and academic factors that make up the justification for turning this into a book.
My interest in Taiwan’s small parties dates back to the earliest elections I witnessed in Taiwan in 1989 and 1992, which saw the failed attempt of a number of leftist parties to break the DPP/KMT monopoly of the party system. My first book, which came out of my PhD, was Party Politics in Taiwan (Fell 2005a). It looked at party change of the three main political parties in the first period of multi-party politics (1991–2004). Although I gave much more attention to the KMT and DPP in the book, my third party case was the NP. The NP had been a medium-sized party at its peak in the mid-1990s, but by the time I was doing my fieldwork, it had degenerated into a shrinking and extremist niche party. I became puzzled over why the NP would adopt what seemed irrational electoral strategies and did not attempt to respond to electoral defeat by moving closer to public opinion, instead preferring to prioritise ideological orthodoxy. Why would a party proudly go for what was clearly a strategy of electoral suicide?
The puzzling experience of studying the NP helped motivate me to write my first journal article on small parties in Taiwan, which attempted to offer a broad overview of the development of such parties from 1989 through to 2004 (Fell 2005b). The focus of that piece was on the failed early leftist parties and the more successful splinter parties that had broken away from the two mainstream parties. I could not recall whether I even mentioned the GPT, and on rereading the article, I discovered I just had two brief paragraphs on the party’s early period in the 1990s.
The turning point came in October 2012, when I was asked to share news of a research funding bid from the Australian Greens by the then Co-Convenor of the GPT, Yu Wan-ju (余宛如). The previous year, Yu had been a student on the MA Food Anthropology at my university, SOAS University of London, and had written her dissertation on Taiwanese beef noodles and national identity. I had been fascinated by the fact that just months after submitting her dissertation in mid-September 2011, she had stood as a GPT candidate in the January 2012 parliamentary elections. Instead of sharing the news of the funding opportunity among my students, I decided to bid for the project myself, together with a Taiwanese scholar and former GPT candidate and Convenor Peng Yen-wen (彭渰雯). Although we did not receive the Australian Green Party funds, we decided to go ahead and run a couple of focus group sessions involving current and former GPT leaders, activists and candidates in December 2012. The experience of those two focus groups left me hooked on the topic. The disorganised nature of the party and the idealism, passion, hostility and anger I witnessed in those initial sessions was entirely different from anything I had experienced in my studies of mainstream parties in Taiwan. This was to be the start of eight years of interviews, focus groups, surveys and other data collection that together form the basis of this book.
When in 2013 I came to the task of writing a journal article that explained the fortunes of small parties after 2004 (going beyond my 2005 article), the GPT received much more attention (Fell 2014). Of course, the majority of the article had to be on the splinter parties, but I devoted over a page and a half to the development of the GPT between 2006 and 2012. Although one of the article’s reviewers asked me to drop the GPT section, I resisted that revision request. It took us longer than we would have liked to get the first academic publications from our project out. Naturally, we were distracted by multiple teaching, research and administrative pressures. Peng was under even more pressure, as she is not only heavily involved in a number of social activism projects, but also had her second child in the second year of our research. As we built up our data collection, we also had our first GPT-centred publications with ‘The Electoral Fortunes of Taiwan’s Green Party: 1996–2012’ (Fell and Peng 2016) and the book chapter ‘The Revival of Taiwan’s Green Party after 2008’ (Fell and Peng 2017). While the former examined the overall development of the party up to the 2012 elections, the latter concentrated on its development during the KMT’s rule between 2008 and 2016. Although we were able to bring in some of our fieldwork data, I was convinced that the quantity and quality of our collected data justified a book-length treatment of the GPT.
One of my biggest regrets about this project is that, despite multiple attempts, I was unable to persuade Peng Yen-wen to join the book writing. It has been a pleasure to co-author with her over this period and she has been my mentor, guiding me through the complexity of Green Party politics and correcting my many misunderstandings. I also should note that she has been instrumental in so much of the data collection in the project.
Academic justifications
There are also a range of academic reasons that make an in-depth study of Taiwan’s Green Party worthwhile. Firstly, the GPT is without doubt the most international Taiwanese party, as a very active member of both Asia Pacific Greens and Global Greens. In fact, it was also joined by a second Taiwanese ecological party, the Taiwan Trees Party, in these bodies. Although the KMT and DPP are members of similar international party federations (International Democratic Union and Liberal International), their levels of engagement do not come close to those of the GPT. Our interviews revealed how much GPT activists value this international engagement. Moreover, the six core values of the Global Greens Charter serve as an important set of guidelines for how the GPT tries to promote its ideals domestically. At a time when China is attempting to squeeze Taiwan’s international space at every possible opportunity, the Green’s global activism represents an important component of Taiwan’s civil society-led public diplomacy.
There are also comparative reasons that make the GPT worth studying. Green Parties tend to have more electoral success in older democracies and where the levels of economic prosperity are higher. However, despite Japan and South Korea being older democracies and having higher levels of economic wealth than Taiwan, both their Green Parties were established much later (2011–12) and have had less electoral impact compared to the GPT. In fact, in recent years, the GPT has worked in solidarity with both these neighbouring parties to try to support them and share its own knowledge and experiences. There is a rich literature on the Green Party of the England and Wales, but it took that party 38 years to win its first parliamentary seat (Meguid 2008; Spoon 2011). In contrast, the GPT won its first (and so far only) National Assembly seat within months of its establishment in 1996.
Given the dominance of the KMT and DPP in Taiwan’s party system, it is not surprising that most of the party politics literature has focused on these actors. However, long-term observers of party politics as well as survey research has highlighted the growing alienation from mainstream parties. Parties are often listed as one of the least trusted political institutions in surveys. Scholars have described the 2014 Sunflower Movement as being partly caused by the perceived failure of mainstream party politics (Cole 2017). Howev...
