As I write, Taiwan is in the throes of a typically hard-fought campaign, the first combined election for the presidency and parliament. Candidates have put forward their platforms and attacked their opponents' performance and proposals in election ads, at rallies and in televised debates. The opposition candidate, Tsai Ing-wen has mobilized dissatisfaction with incumbent President Ma Ying-jeou's policy performance and put forward an alternative vision for Taiwan's economic development and relationship with China. That she and her DPP party have become viable challengers to the current regime appears to be a sure sign of the competitiveness and health of Taiwan's democracy. Given this scenario, it may seem an incongruous moment to note that all is not well with democracy in Taiwan.
However, in this carefully reasoned and strongly argued book (which avoids regressing into polemics despite the major thrust and substantive implications of its theories), Mikael Mattlin provides one of the most cogent arguments yet that many aspects of Taiwan's democratic consolidation remain incomplete. Despite voting for the fifth time for their president, and the genuine prospect of a third change of party-in-power, this book explicitly articulates what many Taiwan scholars have long intimated. Namely, Taiwan possesses the veneer of democracy, but many formal and informal political structures (including those that fall under the rubric of political culture) are essentially unchanged since the one-party era.
Breaking with the conventional wisdom that invokes national identity cleavages as an explanation for political polarization, Mattlin argues that incremental liberalization led by the authoritarian party state allowed it to maintain its power by carefully choosing what would change (and what would not) and modifying its behaviour accordingly. In the absence of a complete break from the ancien régime, the KMT was able to shape the form that post-democratic political and social structures would take, and ensured that it would continue to benefit from them. At the same time, because it allowed ostensibly free and fair elections and other trappings of democracy, it was able to satisfy the majority of citizens' desire for “democracy,” while stealthily ensuring its grip on power would continue.
This is not a polemical text, but it doesn't shirk from laying blame at the KMT's door for refusing to embrace the deep-seated democratic reforms that Taiwan needed to make a full transition from the one-party era. This refusal is most seriously manifest in its continuing cultivation of patronage networks at all levels of society, and, more obviously, in the party's essential refusal to fully cede power following presidential elections in 2000 and 2004. Never fully accepting that it was no longer the “in-party”, the KMT obstructed Chen Shui-bian at every turn, responding to his appointment of a KMT Premier by trying to impeach him. Pan-blue obstructionism in the Legislative Yuan brought it to a virtual standstill. And then, despite losing again in 2004, a result that the party tried its best to annul, KMT Honorary Chairman Lien Chan visited the PRC in 2005 as if he was an elected head of state.
Clearly there is no quick fix to the serious problems that Mattlin documents, and the book will not convince you that either a Ma or Tsai victory in 2012 will facilitate the requisite reforms. Indeed, there is evidence in these pages that elections are exacerbating politicization and ensure the continuation of a long held winner-takes-all mentality. Because Taiwan's political culture has not developed beyond the zero-sum conception of democratic competition caused by the concentration of power prior to liberalization, parties are essentially engaged in permanent mobilization efforts, hindering both governance and further democratic reform. Because underlying structural conditions that have not changed much since the one-party era, the procedural aspects of democracy are a thin veneer under which non-democratic behaviours persist.
Mattlin makes a strong argument for how we study Taiwan, suggesting that comparing this unusual polity to the US or Europe, and imposing expectations based on Western experience, is analytically problematic. Instead, we need to recognize that highly politicized societies have occurred in numerous newer democracies where the transition to a democratic system has been incomplete. Developing the concept of “structural polarization” (“concurrent polarization and political divisiveness over a number of issues and in a variety of institutions in society”, p. 5), Mattlin provides a promising framework for future analysts of Taiwanese political development.
This book has much to recommend it (which I do without hesitation). It is theoretically rigorous and marshals an abundance of empirical material based on years' of fieldwork conducted in Taiwan. It makes an obvious contribution to the literature on Taiwan, but is accessible enough for a student text. It is also very readable, with many vivid descriptions of political life in Taiwan (like the description of police officers waiting outside a legislator's home on election night ready to arrest him if he loses the election and thus immunity from criminal prosecution). Finally, in these straitened times, it is available as a relatively inexpensive paperback.
