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Abstract
The Taiwan Provincial Council is the subject of this study. Based on the KMT's nomination strategy and election results in the two provincial councilor elections in 1972 and 1977, it revisits and revises the KMT's factional substitution policy of the 1970s. During the 1972 local elections, the KMT aggressively promoted factional replacement in the election of magistrates, mayors, and Taiwan Provincial Councilors. The KMT eliminated political figures with local factional backgrounds on a large scale in the name of promoting young talents. With respect to the Taiwan Provincial Councilors, the replacement was intended to eliminate Taiwan Provincial Councilors elected prior to 1968 in order to suppress the inter-county local faction that existed in the Taiwan Provincial Council at the time. Most Taiwan Provincial Councilors who had served for more than two terms were not re-elected, thereby generating a significant generational shift in the makeup of Taiwan Provincial Council. The KMT’s control over the Taiwan Provincial Council was thus strengthened. Despite a significant reduction in mobilization power due to the KMT's suppression of local factions, the party's political base was unaffected by the absence of a strong national opposition at the time. During the 1977 local elections, the KMT continued to suppress local factions while giving support to KMT members who had no factional background. The local factions were no longer as effective as they had been during the local elections in 1972. Except for a few counties and cities, no local factions abandoned the KMT, and their capacity for mobilization improved. However, factions outside the party successfully mobilized over 7% of new voters who had not voted previously. This resulted in unprecedented setbacks for the KMT, including the defeat of several Taiwan provincial councilors from local factions. Taiwan has since formed an opposition capable of mobilizing the entire country.
Abstract
Farmers' Associations are meant to be self-government associations dedicated to the service of farmers. However, in reality Farmers' associations have taken on strong political overtones, and their effect-tiveness has been affected by this. In elections for all levels of public officials, Farmers' Association have actively campaigned for political parties and/or local factions. In elections for officers of the Farmers' associations, political forces have used bribery and violence to try to gain control of the associations. This has causes the Farmers' associations to become the site of political struggles, and in the process the welfare of farmers has become merely an empty slogan. How have Farmers' Associations evolved into political bodies? What is the goal of the political forces associated with Farmers' Associations? How do Farmers' Associations use their originations to mobilize support? Have the recent runs on Farmers' Associations credit unions been related to politics? These are the main questions that this paper will address. The political overtones of Farmers' Associations dates to the Japanese era. The colonial government treated Farmers' Associations as a tool to control political attitudes and recover capital from farmers' villages. The post-war KMT government overhauled the system, but the basic idea of controlling farmers through Farmers' Associations did not change. The KMT used the Farmers' Associations' credit unions to gain the support for local factions, which gained a local monopoly of politi-cal and financial resources. These abundant financial resources and the well developed orginational resources the Farmers' Association pos-sessed assured that local political forces would compete to participate in the system. The Taichung County and Kaohsiung County examples prove that both pro-KMT and anti-KMT factions strove to gain control of the Farmers' Associations. However, the involvement of politics in Farmers' Associations has downgraded the original mission to serve farmers. Recification of this problem would require a process of depo-liticization and the independence of credit unions from the Farmers' associations.
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.
Abstract
It is well recognized that intra-party competition marks a major consequence of the single nontransferable vote under multi-member district system(SNTV-MMD), currently used in Taiwan's legislature elections. A key issue in Taiwan's electoral study is thus how candi-dates, especially those from the same party, divide their votes a-mong various categories that differentiate the voters. Since the data set revealing this information is usually a large matrix of categorical variables, existing multivariate statistical methods are either inap-plicable or inadequate. This paper demonstrates that correspond-dence analysis is an appropriate statistical tool to solve this prob-lem. This method treats an n × m matrix as n vectors in an m-di-mensional space, and finds a k-dimensional subspace that maxi-mizes the variance of the projections of the n vectors. Utilizing this method, this paper first illustrates the Chi-square distance between candidates and the sub-district regions. It then designs indexes to describe the degree of vote concentration for each candidate, fac-tion, and party, and correlate it with the electoral performances of these actors. Statistical analysis indicates that, given the same vote share, inertia, and dimensionality, overnominating one candidate decreases the seat share of the KMT by 11.73%.
Abstract
In the year 2000, the first transfer of central political power in Taiwan, had a deep impact on and influenced not only the regional factions which had used to rely on the Kuo-Ming-Tang (KMT), but also had a bearing on the new government claimed by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). The point of view on local politics has changed. Local factions in Chang-hua County cannot depart from this impact either. The Hong-pai (red-faction) and the Bai-pai (white faction) the two main faction’s influence in Chang-hua County has been reduced. These two factions used to provide strong mobilizational ability in the said county. Due to fact that the regime they once served, did not continue to exist over a long period of time. A severe shortage of mobilization forced the Hong-pai and the Bai-pai to departmentalize their organizations and to individualize the mobilization. The research for this paper discovered that Chang-hua County has no comprehensive influence over regional factions at present, because politicians progressively have no collective spirit to identify with a particular faction. However, in order to win a local election victory or to strive for the allotment of abundant political and financial resources, politicians frequently tried to forge alliances. This has been brought about to dissolve the boundaries between factions, and factions are being pushed further out. Also, disruptions in the KMT in the past years, encourage them to establish party member's and the regional faction's identities. In other words, the disagreement among the KMT has decreased, while increasing within the DPP. As the DPP won the presidential election, cabinets not only master the authority of lower level governmental administration, but also step in on administrative matters. Competition and inconsistent policies between cabinets and regional factions gradually became more drastic. It is difficult to get away from the disagreement as the DPP won the election.
Abstract
During the authoritarian period, the typical organizational structure of clientelism was the pyramid shape. It provided several advantages for the clientelist elites and the KMT. The limited openness of electoral politics helped maintain the pyramid-shaped organizational structure of clientelism. The structure of broker organizations is one of the main factors shaping the mobilization capacity of clientelism. The better the brokerage organizational structure, the easier it is for patrons to mobilize brokers and clients. The more fragmented the brokerage organizational structure is, the more difficult it is for patrons to integrate them. Fully competitive electoral politics increases the competition among clientelist elites. The competition speeds the trend toward fragmentation of brokerage organizations. During the authoritarian period, local factions rarely supported more than one candidate at the same time in elections. Therefore, local factions did not face the coordination problems they would later face under the SNTV system. The KMT did encounter these coordination problems. On one hand, it used local factions to differentiate candidates. On the other hand, a certain amount of hard-core supporters helped the KMT divide votes optimally among its candidates. Fully competitive electoral politics gave clientelist elites an opportunity to access the state resources, which were no longer limited to the local level. However, under the Taiwanese specific electoral institution, Single Nontransferable Vote (SNTV) system, the new competitive politics not only increased inter-factional conflicts within the KMT, but also intra-factional conflicts. These intra-factional conflicts precipitated the breakdown of the factional organizational structure.
