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Observer urges reform of legislative election system
(Taipei Review, 08/01/2001)
Story Type: Politics; Political Development
Byline: Laurence Eyton
The people of Taiwan have had more than a year to accustom themselves to the new realities: a president nurtured by the DPP, a hopelessly divided legislature, and a determined crackdown on corruption in politics. But how do outside observers, with their different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives, see things? Laurence Eyton, managing editor of the English-language daily Taipei Times and a long-time observer of the Taiwan scene, assesses the island's politics "one year on."
Taiwan has received numerous plaudits for its democratization. These are, of course, really plaudits for the insti tution of a system of representative elections without bloodshed in a highly contentious political environment. Let us not underrate this feat; few countries slough off dictatorship so easily. Spain's attempt in the 1970s was punctuated by an attempted coup, Russia's by a presidentially backed military assault on a recalcitrant legislature in 1993, and the Philippines saw numerous attempted coups against Corazon Aquino, some of them, and note this well about the complexities of democratic transformation, by radical members of the armed forces who thought Aquino's commitment to reform was insufficient.
There is little doubt that two major factors contributed to the peacefulness of the change in Taiwan. The first was the lurking fear that political strife producing severe social dislocation might have tempted China in some way to step in to "save the day." Whether China could have done this is irrelevant; fear that it might was the important factor. The second element was the political skill of President Lee Teng-hui.
Lee was, of course, in a supremely advantageous position to bring about change. He combined a strong vision of a democratic society with the power of an autocrat, as both president and--far more to the point--chairman of the ruling Kuomintang (KMT), and not just any chairman but the anointed heir of Chiang Ching-kuo. If the KMT was at that time a colonial occupying power in Taiwan, Lee was the emperor. In a party where obedience had always taken priority over intelligence, his position as Chiang's heir neutralized a great deal of potential criticism. Lese majesty was something that many in the old guard could not bring themselves to commit, whatever their private suspicions about Lee's ideological stance. Of course some could, and did, and Lee's vanquishing of his enemies by cunning divide-and-rule tactics showed such political mastery that a connoisseur of gamesmanship might regret that he only had such a small stage on which to demon strate his statesmanship.
As for the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), it knew full well that Lee's aims were its own, and the late 1980s and early 1990s were interesting for a symbiosis between the two in which DPP radicalism would put an item on the political agenda that Lee would, after a wait of a year or so, cautiously adopt. The DPP was useful to Lee in that it could always be relied on to fill the streets when conservatives seemed to be getting the upper hand as, for example, in the 1992 struggle over whether presidential elections should be direct or through an electoral college--where it was assumed the KMT would be able to manipulate the vote.
Moreover, Lee was useful to the DPP because of his impeccably democratic vision of what Taiwan should become--a vision he did not share with his own party. Whenever he was faced with a choice between the conservative husbanding of his party's power at the expense of democratic change or a more liberal policy perhaps detrimental to the KMT's interests, he unswervingly chose country over party.
Since Lee has of late been vilified as the destroyer of his party, it is worth pointing out that his determination to democratize and ability to convince the opposition that change was on its way probably kept the KMT in power for nearly a decade past its shelf life. First, without Lee change would have been far more turbulent, and the options of KMT conservatives launching a military crackdown or a "people power" movement attempting to sweep the KMT from power--or even one followed by the other--would have been very real.
Secondly, the KMT took much of the credit and voters' thanks for a democratization that even as late as 1990 it generally opposed. The DPP, on the other hand, found that, since the KMT had stolen their ideas, all it had to fall back on was the unpopular notion of formal independence, in misguided support of which a goodly proportion of the first generation of elected DPP legislators fell on their swords in the second round of democratic legislative elections in 1995.
Given the similarity of the aims of Lee Teng-hui and the DPP, especially the development of Taiwan-centric politics, there was little to differentiate the parties for the last half of the 1990s. From the current vantage point, that period seems now like a vanished golden age of stability and consensus. One cannot but wonder whether a less easy, consensual birth for democratization would have produced a more robust infant a decade later.
Fundamental to the present political impasse is the election of legislators. This uses a curious system, devised in Japan, which involves single non-transferable votes (SNTV) in multimember constituencies. Taiwan is divided into a small number of electoral districts--currently twenty-eight. Yet it has 225 legislators, 176 of whom are directly elected from those districts. This is achieved by having more than one legislator represent a particular district, the number of legislators per district being calculated according to the size of the local population.
Thus in Chiayi City, with an electorate of around 200,000, one legislator is returned--a rather simple first-past-the-post race. But in Taipei County, twenty-seven legislators are elected, last time from a field of more than fifty. Each voter can vote only once for only one candidate. An elector in Taipei County must, therefore, not only decide which of the three or four parties he should vote for but, of those parties' several candidates--the KMT and the DPP would field well over a dozen each--which is the one to go for. Once votes are cast and tallied, the twenty-seven biggest vote-getters each obtain a legislative seat.
Managing an election campaign under this system is no small feat of ingenuity. The basic problem is that one's own candidates are in competition with one another, as well as with those from other parties. Field too many candidates in a constituency and you will dilute your vote and spoil your chances; field only a few and you will not obtain enough seats. Field a star vote-getter and you run the risk of taking votes away from also-rans who would otherwise have had a chance. Every election in the last decade has seen parties grappling with some kind of vote-maximization system aimed at distributing votes across their field of candidates in such a way as to increase the possibility of winning more seats. (With the exception of the New Party in 1995, these efforts have usually failed.) It is a psephologist's nightmare.
But the system has two other far more serious drawbacks--drawbacks, that is, for the democratic system; for many candidates they are sterling benefits that they are loath to change. First, such elections are easily corruptible; secondly, they are likely to lead to a future radicalization of politics that will make consensus even more elusive.
Both of these deficiencies are the result of the vast difference between the number of voters in a large electoral district such as Taipei County or either of the two districts of Taipei City, and the actual number of votes in the multimember districts needed to win a seat.
For example, Taipei City has two electoral districts returning ten legislators each. The total number of eligible voters in the city in December 1998 was 1,868,860, split almost evenly between the two districts. Of these 1,230,052 actually voted, a turnout of about 66 percent. None of the twenty legislators who won seats actually managed to win 10 percent of the eligible vote. Eleven of those elected failed to get even 10 percent of the votes cast.
In Taipei North, Mu Ming-chu of the KMT got 6.77 percent of votes cast, or 4.45 percent of eligible votes. Lin Chung -mo of the DPP won 6.45 percent of votes cast, 4.24 percent of eligible votes, while in Taipei South Fung Hu-hsiang of the New Party got 6.54 of votes cast, 4.30 percent of the eligible vote, and his New Party comrade Lai Shyh-bao gained 4.97 percent of votes cast or 3.27 percent of the eligible vote.
Why is this a problem? Think what would happen if a municipality with ten electoral districts ran a first-past-the-post race. Assuming a two-horse contest, the winner in each district would have to win over 50 percent of the votes. Even on a 65 percent turnout rate he would have to persuade four voters out of ten to support him. How much easier it is in some districts in Taiwan, therefore, where as we have seen one only need to win the support of four people out of a hundred. Four percent is, at the moment, the island's unemployment rate. It is also roughly the proportion of the adult population who want imme diate unification with China, have been divorced, or suffer from clinical depression.
Getting elected on the strength of the support of such a small percentage of the electorate leads to a number of temptations, mostly involving cash. The expenditure of NT$500 (US$15) per vote could produce a legislative seat for as little as NT$20 million (US$588,000). Of course not all those who are bribed will vote as asked, if at all. Assuming that only 20 percent of purchased votes are effective, this would boost the cost of a seat to about US$3 million. Considering the influence that a Taiwan legislator is able to peddle with astonishingly few legal worries, this is a fine investment. Seats in Taipei County have, in the recent past, been bought by corrupt financiers and businessmen merely so that they can use legislators' constitutional immunity from arrest and prosecution to stay out of jail. Gangsters with lurid criminal records have similarly used hard cash, as well as intimidation and the calling of favors, to get elected to the legislature, a process known as being "bleached white," made respectable by election.
Taipei County's shady entrepreneurs and outright gangsters are only, however, flashes of bright color in the muddy palate of Taiwan politics. Outside the relatively sophisticated big cities, the SNTV system facilitates domination of the political landscape by local political machines based on patron-client relationships, often linked to gangsters who carry out the less pleasant tasks--vote-buying, for example--in return for a cut of the spoils. The convenient rezoning of land and the awarding of construction contracts are favorite payoffs, not to mention the inevitable word to the local constabulary about "not bothering" certain establishments. The world is that of The Godfather, a feudal relationship where Don Corleone looks after "his" people as long as they obey his wishes. And this is facilitated by an electoral system in which only a relatively small proportion of people in any community have to be involved.
Many political commentators claim that the old patron-client system is breaking down. Urbanization makes for an altogether different political environment. People who depend on the land for a livelihood are beholden to those who provide credit, those who provide access to the market, and those who provide their water (farmers' and irrigation associations), all of which are bastions of "traditional politics."
But if the rapid urbanization of the past thirty years has separated people from the land, from traditional communities, and from "traditional politics," it has left them in the big cities, perhaps rootless, but also free agents in the making of political choices. If demographic shifts have weakened one way in which the electoral system might be manipulated, they are also likely to provide strong support for another: Taiwan's electoral system makes its legislature a potential cranks' paradise.
Remember that the support of 4 percent of the electorate can win a candidate a seat. A candidate who can find the right issue to champion to gain the fervent support of a small minority of the voting population can win a seat in the legislature. This is, of course, in direct conflict with the idea that politics is about winning votes at the center: that winning an election is a matter of building up as broad-based a consensus as possible among voters.
But in Taiwan all that is necessary is to find an issue about which four out of 100 voters feel passionate and present oneself as their champion, and Taiwan's new urban communities, which display a high degree of interpersonal alienation, are fertile ground waiting to be ploughed by the astute single-issue candidate. Remembering our list above, immediate unification, better welfare for the unemployed, more equitable divorce laws, and free Prozac might all seem to be worthy of consideration. Some of these seem sensible, some not. But that is not the issue. What is important is to find a special interest that just enough people identify strongly with and stake out the territory as one's own, which can be achieved most effectively by being more extreme in one's condemnation of the forces this interest group dislikes and more extreme in one's demands for a solution than anybody else.
And of course there are some far more mainstream issues looking for a champion--gender equality (especially equal pay for equal work, something never enforced here), gay rights, and welfare support for the elderly are obvious contenders.
So far, only unificationism and to a lesser extent gender issues have produced this kind of "damn the majority" radicalism, which is why its development as a political strategy has been noticed. The problem is that ardent unificationism has at least until recently usually been seen as a dying political creed. That it may be. But that does not prevent its advocates in the legislature from having stumbled upon a new kind of democratic politics.
As noted above, two legislators were returned for Taipei South with only 4 percent of the eligible vote. Both were from the New Party. Both are stalwart backers of the unificationist cause. Both have been highly visible in the legislature in the past three years and have enjoyed media attention far in excess of their status as the only-just-successful candidates fielded by a party devoid of influence.
One of the two represents a constituency in which mainlanders constitute twice the average for Taiwan as a whole. He appeals mainly to veterans of Chiang Kai-shek's army and their families, many of whom have, because of their public-sector employment or residence in rural areas, particularly in the southern part of the island, missed out on the blossoming of Taiwan's prosperity. They feel cheated by the KMT, which seems to have abandoned them, and they seethe with resentment toward Taiwanese who, they think, prospered on the back of their sacrifice. It might be an unattractive mindset, but in the decaying slums known as "military villages" there are many who have it. They will vote their representative back into the legislature as long as he wants the job.
In Taiwan, with its highly competitive sensationalist news media, where controversy and showmanship count for per haps more than sound policy, such "special-issue" candidates at the margins are going to become increasingly common over the next decade, if only because it is going to become the easiest way to get elected.
The problem is that this is going to lead to a radicalized political environment where longevity in politics will depend more on keeping the support of the special interest group on which you have staked your claim, rather than on developing the broad appeal of the policies you advocate. An empty politics of voguish gesture is the likely result, with the development of a national consensus the likely and most serious casualty.
The obvious place where this matters is of course cross-strait affairs, where disunity on Taiwan's part can only play into Beijing's hands. But there are many other purely domestic issues. The most obvious one that comes to mind is the question of a welfare state, which many people want but few wish to pay for. Taiwan's government has always operated on a "pay little, get little" basis. Are Taiwanese prepared to pay more tax to get better welfare provision? A choice needs to be made, one that requires prior sober debate. A radicalization of the political environment by single-issue grandstanding is going to delay and obscure this.
This, I think, will be the trend over the next decade until the level of "white noise" simply becomes too great and there evolves a broad-based demand for a change in the electoral system to produce a political environment more conducive to consensus. As long as the KMT travels down the unificationist path adopted by KMT Chairman Lien Chan and at odds with the extremely popular policies of Lee Teng-hui, probably no party in the immediate future will be able to muster the strength in the legislature and the National Assembly to change the Constitution to dump SNTV voting and multimember electoral districts, even if it wanted to.
In today's political climate it is almost impossible to imagine how the National Development Conference of 1996 could have taken place. There, the political parties in the space of a week hammered out agreement on vital constitutional changes. The cozy middle-of-the-road consensus of the 1990s is past, and Taiwan is plunging deeper into an ever more fractured landscape that will prove ever more difficult to negotiate.
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