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The Local Political Ecology of Penghu in Democratic Transition
Owing to the political transition from the type of authoritarian to democratic system in Taiwan since 1980’ s, the study of democratized transition has become an important issue in political academic discipline. However, there is scarce deeper exploration at Penghu area around the related studies. Therefore, the main purpose of this research, under the analysis on the process of democratization in Taiwan, will examine the force change among the local factions and explore the impact on the local political ecology in Penghu. The following findings are emerged from this research. (1) Democratization reveals authoritarian domination had weakened for manipulative and coordinative power at local society, and makes a more institutionalized election pattern to be a structural basis for local political power operation as well. It also highly enhanced the number of candidates on elections and makes the traditional “bi-factionalism pattern” transformed into a multi-regional competition pattern in Penghu. (2) After the governor election in mid-1980’s and by accompanying with the effect of KMT’ s “localized policy” and abolishing Martial Law, the military unit had gradually lost its inherent power for a leading role in election. In addition to the challenge from DPP at the period of time, the feature of “the nominated was equal to get elected” by KMT had collapsed and it had established firmly a political type of party competition. (3) Even if democratized transition boosted the political type of party competition, the influence of existing parties and military units had been gradually loosing. By contrast, local factions based on the combination of family, geography, and social relationship as well as burgeoning politicalcommercial sector- “Lin Pie” had become the main characters of regional political ecology in Penghu.
