E-Notes

Making Sense of Taiwan’s Legislative Election

By Shelley Rigger

January 4, 2005

Shelly Rigger is Brown Associate Professor of East Asian Politics at Davidson College and a Senior Fellow at FPRI.

Taiwan’s electorate handed pundits a surprise on December 11 when they allowed the beleaguered Blue alliance—consisting of the island’s long-time ruling party, the Kuomintang (KMT), and its spin-offs, the People First Party (PFP) and New Party (NP)—to retain its slim legislative majority. The Blues emerged with 113 out of 225 seats; another eleven are held by independents, several of whom have ties to the Blues. The competing Green alliance, whose standard-bearer—President Chen Shui-bian—controls Taiwan’s executive branch, came away with 101 seats.

Spokesmen for Chen’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) tried to spin the result as something other than a defeat. They noted that theirs remains the largest party in the legislature, with 89 seats, and they stressed its improvement in both seats (2) and votes (2 percentage points) over the previous election. But these glass-half-full observations could not hide the party’s disappointment at failing to meet its own goal: a Green majority that would have given Chen the legislative backing he needs to push through his policy agenda.

The party’s performance fell short of both its needs and its expectations. Within hours of the polls’ closing, DPP activists were rebuking themselves for overconfidence, and any doubt that they considered the election a failure was dispelled when Chen Shui-bian resigned his post as party chair three days later.

While few expected the Greens to win a majority outright, most analysts expected them to come close, and a continued Blue majority seemed the least likely outcome in the weeks before the election. Several factors shaped these expectations. First, Chen’s reelection with a hair over 50 percent of the vote in March looked like a breakthrough for the Greens. Never before had the DPP captured a majority of votes in a national election (Chen won his first term as president with 39 percent of the vote in a three-way race). Chen received 1.5 million more votes in 2004 than he had four years earlier.

Hopes for a Green victory in December were boosted further by Blue leaders’ disastrous reaction to their defeat in March, and by their obsessive effort to overturn that result. With their leaders focused on the previous election, Blue legislative candidates were hard-pressed to conceive and execute a workable strategy for the current one.

The Greens, in contrast, were buoyed by the presidential win and united in their determination to give Chen legislative backing to implement his platform. Their candidate slate—which was finalized early to give candidates plenty of time to campaign—demonstrated discipline and strategic thinking.

All these factors combined to convince many observers—as well as most Green politicians—that the DPP and TSU would increase their vote share enough to increase their share of seats significantly. A working majority seemed within reach, especially if a few independent legislators could be brought over to the Green side. Thus, the Blues’ continued hold on legislative power came as a shock.

The international press quickly settled on an explanation: the election was a rebuke to President Chen and a rejection of his party and its positions, especially its resistance to compromise with Beijing. Reuters asserted “Chen’s Pro-Independence Party Loses Taiwan Poll,” and CNN stated, “Taiwan Says No to New Mandate.” The New York Times went even farther: “In Taiwan Ballot, Ties With Beijing Seem to Be a Winner.” Some observers even accepted Beijing’s claim that its vociferous hostility to Chen had frightened Taiwan’s voters into choosing Blue candidates.

DPP representatives produced a very different interpretation of the result. They blamed their party’s poor performance on technical errors in coordinating and executing their electoral strategy. The night of the election, DPP Secretary General Chang Chun-hsiung said, “the key reason for this failure was the vote allocation strategy.” The DPP party line blamed tactical mistakes, dismissing assertions that Taiwanese intentionally voted against the Greens’ positions on policy issues.

Neither of these interpretations is correct, but both contain a grain of truth. DPP supporters’ insistence that their party’s failure to pick up more seats was the result of technical errors is unconvincing. It is true that under Taiwan’s complex electoral formula, parties must have strategic dexterity to convert their popular support into commensurate representation in the legislature. But the DPP actually did well in this regard. More than three-quarters of the DPP candidates running in districts were elected. Its share of seats exceeded its vote share substantially, which means it converted its votes into seats efficiently.

From the standpoint of vote allocation, the DPP’s performance was very strong. The average DPP candidate received only one tenth of one percent of votes more than he or she needed to win, so few DPP votes were wasted. (The average KMT candidate, in contrast, received thirty percent more votes than he or she needed, suggesting that a more ambitious nominating strategy might have given the party even more seats.)

In sum, the DPP came close to maximizing its legislative representation, given the votes available to it. The real weakness in the Green camp was the TSU. Only about a quarter of the TSU’s nominees were elected, and the party’s share of the directly-elected seats was barely half its vote share. The average TSU candidate received only 80 percent of the votes needed to win. Clearly, the TSU nominated too many candidates, which means most of its votes were wasted.

Despite the emphasis in DPP party headquarters on technical problems, even some DPP politicians acknowledged another source of trouble. The day after the election, several DPP lawmakers criticized the party’s campaign strategy, which they said hurt its image with moderate voters. Indeed, while problems with vote allocation may have undercut individual DPP candidates in some districts, the party’s biggest deficiency was failing to increase its vote share more dramatically. Without a rise in vote share, even a technically perfect campaign can increase a party’s seat share only marginally. Between 1989 and 2001, the DPP consistently captured between 30 and 33 percent of the vote in legislative elections. So this year’s performance—36 percent—was a modest improvement, but one consistent with the party’s historical performance in legislative races.

To increase its vote share—and its influence in the legislature—the DPP needed to reach out to voters who do not normally choose DPP candidates, and on this front, its strategy clearly failed.

In last weeks of the campaign, President Chen took an increasingly strong role, firing off a series of broadsides aimed at energizing the campaign. Some press reports attributed his stepped-up efforts to late-November polls showing the DPP running behind. According to DPP insiders, Chen was worried that the TSU was chipping away at the DPP’s base in a bid to increase its leverage in the coalition. Whatever the reason, Chen steered the campaign sharply to the left, hoping to stimulate the Taiwan First enthusiasm that worked so well for him in the presidential campaign. The flood of controversial ideas he put forward included reviving the campaign for a new constitution, raising questions about the appropriateness of the national flag and announcing his intention to rename some quasi-governmental bodies agencies (including the island’s representative offices overseas) to stress “Taiwan.”

Not surprisingly, President Chen’s rhetoric took aim at Beijing, but it also targeted Washington. At a campaign rally on December 7 Chen said, “When the US voiced its warning last year, at that time, many people were scared to death, saying I would be damned … Did we yield, did we compromise, no.” In response, US officials twice made statements explicitly rebuffing Chen’s stump speeches in early December. Some candidates complained even before the votes were counted that Chen’s frantic eleventh hour campaigning was upstaging the candidates themselves, and driving away centrist voters.

Chen’s final push failed to attract new voters to the DPP. It probably helped to mobilize DPP supporters—this may explain how the party’s performance showed a modest improvement in a year with low voter turn-out—but it was not a strategy for expanding the Greens’ base. Taiwan’s electorate has shown time and again that it is not eager to see its leaders provoke the PRC and the US unnecessarily.

In the end, explaining the results of the December 11 election may actually be quite easy: it looks very much like other legislative elections. Perhaps what really needs explaining is Chen Shui-bian’s victory in March, for it is that result that stands out as an exception from historical patterns.

Chen’s reelection can be attributed to a combination of a masterful choice of a campaign theme and a weak opponent. Chen’s slogan—“Taiwan Yes!”—captured the theme of his campaign. “Taiwan Yes!” conveyed hope, optimism and love for Taiwan; voters did not read it as a code for Taiwan Independence or any other concrete policy position. Throughout the campaign, Chen used this approach to dominate the campaign agenda and force his opponents to play a defensive game. The Blue candidates lacked charisma and ideas to challenge Chen, and their past association with unification made them vulnerable to insinuations that they could not be trusted to put Taiwan first.

This strategy simply did not transfer to the legislative election. The Blue camp’s legislative candidates are local politicians with deep roots in their districts. They ran individual campaigns based on their own qualifications and constituent service; many KMT candidates, in particular, took pains to distinguish themselves from their party leadership. Unlike the Blue presidential ticket, Blue legislative candidates could not be “painted with a red brush,” (accused of association with the PRC).

As for the third interpretation of the December 11 results— that Beijing frightened Taiwan’s voters into backing down—this simply doesn’t hold water. The election result validated the strategy Beijing actually used in the election—keeping its hands off—not the strategy of intimidation it has employed in the past. Even in the highly-charged last weeks of the campaign, the PRC wisely chose to stay above the fray. Taiwanese voters were thus free to vote their preferences, rather than being provoked into an anti-China vote.

This election will have important consequences. Above all, President Chen will continue to operate under the legislative constraints that hampered his agenda during his first term. Nor can he claim a popular mandate. The DPP has justified many of its more controversial positions with the claim that it is following public opinion. In the context of a campaign in which these issues were at the forefront, the Taiwan electorate voted to deny the Greens a majority. It will be more difficult than ever for DPP leaders to make the case that they are trailing, and not leading, the public.

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