Rigger's central puzzle is how the DPP not only hangs together but prospers, given that it is made up of factions that lack a common ideology and disagree on most policy issues. Her answer is that internal democratic processes allow the factions to broker disagreements among themselves, allocate nominations, and find compromises on policy questions. The factions have enough common history in the pro-democracy movement, and a sufficiently compelling common commitment to Taiwanese identity, to keep them together in the face of the common foe, the KMT. “By institutionalizing factionalism,” she says, “the DPP has domesticated it” (p. 71). The KMT, by contrast, has split and resplit under the pressures of democratic transition because its Leninist-style internal processes leave no alternative but exit for politicians whose ambitions or policy preferences are not given priority by the party center.

The same openness that Rigger adduces to explain the DPP's success also, in a sense, explains the success of her book. She was able to obtain frank and full information on party personalities, factions, and controversies both from published sources and from interviews. DPP politicians high and low welcomed her inquiries, and she repaid their openness with an energetic spirit of inquiry. As an example of her access and industry, she includes an appendix that gives insightful, succinct pen portraits of “rising stars in the young generation” of the DPP, reflecting a level of judgment and detail that requires real field expertise to obtain.

The book provides a sure-footed, lucid account of the complex personalities and factions that came together in 1986 to form the DPP. It describes the distinctive Taiwanese legislative electoral system, a multimember district system with a single nontransferable vote modeled on the former Japanese system. This kind of election system exacerbates parties’ fissiparous tendencies, because candidates in a district have to run against other candidates from the same party. But it also provides a way for a sufficiently flexible party to balance the interests of different factions by offering multiple nomination opportunities in each district. For Rigger, to a considerable extent it is the difference between more democratic and more centralized candidate selection processes that explains why the DPP has been able to hang together while the KMT has continued to split.

The author gives a clear account of voter behavior, which is relatively little cued by classbased policy issues like government spending, welfare, or taxation, or by environmental issues, partly because the parties try to fudge the differences among them on these questions. She traces evolving public opinion toward the DPP on the basis of survey and electoral data from Taiwan sources. She is lucid on the evolution of DPP party organization and on intraparty decision making. She gives insightful accounts of why the DPP lost the presidential election of 1996 and why it won in 2000. The book came out before the 2001 Legislative Yuan elections, but provides a good basis for analyzing the party's strong performance that year.

On the confusing issue of what the DPP actually stands for—is it pro–Taiwan independence or not?—Rigger argues that the party's 1996 abandonment of a formal proindependence stance represented a real change of policy rather than a tactical public relations shift. As she acknowledges, however, the party's new policy language emphasized Taiwan's already existing sovereignty, and it campaigned around symbols of Taiwanese national identity. It therefore requires Talmudic skill to discern the difference between the old position and the new. Agree or disagree, her tracing of the intraparty debate over this issue is the clearest and most detailed available in English.

The book makes little use of the substantial English language literature that is available on Taiwan's democratization and elections, or of the broader literatures on democratic transitions, political party organization, or electoral behavior, and does not attempt to show how the case of the DPP adds to cumulative knowledge in these areas. Nor does it try to make its topic accessible to readers who do not already know quite a bit about Taiwan. Apparently, it is intended as a source of data and insight for China/Taiwan specialists. As such it succeeds admirably, providing much new and valuable information and insight.

An irritant is Rigger's cavalier attitude toward romanization—the spelling of Chinese names in the Western alphabet. She uses a mix of three styles: the Wade-Giles system that used to be standard in the study of China and Taiwan, the pinyin system that is now standard for the study of mainland China, and the idiosyncratic spellings preferred by some of the people she is writing about. The mix of styles is confusing, and in both of the first two types she makes mistakes. As a result, only a reader who already knows the names or terms in question can be sure what they are.