Journal of Electoral Studies

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Election, Democratization, and Factionalism

Yeh-Lih Wang
1998 / 05
Volume 5, No.1

pp.77-94
Paper

Abstract

For many decades, Taiwan's local politics has been regarded as faction politics. Thus, to understand the development of Taiwan's local politics, one must explore the operation of local factions. Since 1980s, many scholars in political science as well as sociology have begun to investigate Taiwan's factionalism in terms of Clientelism. And the focuses of those academic researches were mostly on (1) the interactions among local factions, KMT, and the state apparatus, (2) the formation, evolution, and operations of factions, and (3) the monopoly or oligopoly of local economy by the factions. However, along with the transition from authoritarianism to democracy in Taiwan, the nature of local factions has changed dramatically: "money politics" and "mafia politics" have gradually been amalgamated into local politics, and traditional factions could not be seen as "local" factions anymore. When the Taiwan Provincial Government is vastly downsized after 1998, the faction politics is expected to play even more important role not only in local but also in national politics. The goal of this paper, therefore, is to re-examine the traditional clientelist-approach to the study of Taiwan's factionalism, and to investigate the changing role of local factions during the transition period.

Keywords

Local factions

Election

Democratization

Clientelism