The legislative elections may be the last election in Taiwan -- and in the main democratic countries -- to adopt a single, non-transferable vote system with multi-member districts. As this rare election system is about to pass into history (although county and city councils in Taiwan seem set to continue using it), candidates are taking full advantage of its systemic peculiarities for the last time.
One characteristic of the multi-member district system that doesn't exist in other countries is the difficult nomination process which combines matching the right number of candidates nominated with the selection of the right candidates.
For political parties, the selection of suitable candidates is indeed an art form in itself. Nominating too many or too few candidates often means a reduction of the number of candidates elected. In the current campaign, parties must -- in addition to considering their own strength and making flexible adjustments in response to their competitors' nomination strategies -- consider joint nominations with friendly parties and party members, which certainly adds another level of difficulty to the whole exercise.
In addition, in any given district, parties may have to nominate several competing candidates with differing images and intellectual capacities, which makes "market segmentation" for the different candidates very important.
Another characteristic unique to the multi-member district system is the "allocation of votes." The "area-based vote allocation" frequently used by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in the past and the "forced vote allocation" developed by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the New Party for the elections to the third legislature in 1995 are both necessary for the parties to maximize the number of seats won under the multi-member district system.
In single-member districts, the vote maximization that candidates strive for and the seat maximization that parties strive for do not conflict with each other; in multi-member districts they often do.
In this election campaign, both the blue and green camps are working extremely hard to win a legislative majority. They have now almost reached the stage where they are fighting for every single vote, and vote allocation is becoming more important than ever before. Whether voters like it or not, under this system, parties have no choice but to resort to vote allocation, and the party that does so successfully is frequently the winner.
Parties should remember, however, that forced vote allocation based on the month of birth or personal ID number isn't always an exact science. In many districts, it may be more effective to use area-based vote allocation.
Spontaneous vote allocation by many passionate voters has enriched Taiwan's unique vote allocation culture, while also making it more difficult to estimate the effects of vote allocation.
This unique multi-member district system has also endowed the legislative elections with systemic temptations such as internal strife and quarreling between members of the same party.
Particularly with the current clear division between the blue and green camps, candidates from both sides understand that their own "comrades" fighting for the same section of the voter base are one's biggest enemies, that they are the ones who will undermine one's own position, and that they are the ones who will adopt tactical voting and walk over dead bodies to get elected.
In the legislative election process, intra-party struggles will always be more intense than inter-party struggles. In the current campaign there is of course far too much fighting going on between the pan-blue parties -- the KMT, the People First Party and the New Party -- and between the pan-green parties -- the DPP and the Taiwan Solidarity Union. Unless there are sufficient numbers of voters and vote allocation is successful, talk of solidarity and cooperation will be just so much hot air.
As already stated, under the multi-member district system, parties may well nominate more than one candidate in a district. The question of how to clearly delineate the different candidates from each other in order to divide votes will therefore be crucial to victory. Also, under the multi-member district system, candidates do not need to win the support of a majority of voters, nor do they entertain any extravagant hopes of doing so. They only need to obtain the loyal support of a small proportion of voters to get elected, and they therefore often go to extremes or strive to win the support of a particular segment of the electorate.
People may wonder why a candidate disliked by many voters in a district often is elected by a high number of votes. Under the current legislative electoral system, this should not be surprising.
In Japan, which in the past adopted the same system as Taiwan, factional politics became a major characteristic of political operations. Taiwan in the past only had local factions, and none on the national level.
In the current campaign, we have finally seen how, both in the blue and green camps, several campaign teams focused on one particular celebrity candidate have appeared independently of each other, touring the country to stump for their "successors," "representatives" or "alter egos."
The future of this kind of factional politics focused on one individual political celebrity (which is different from the DPP's joint rule by internal factions in the past) is well worth further study.
The current legislative election campaign is focused on electoral issues, and there is no debate over public policy. No matter how many issues are pushed, the real concern of the blue and green camps is the number of seats won, not winning a legislative majority.
Under the multi-member district system, the question of whether or not one side will win a majority will -- besides the number of votes won -- be decided by nomination skills, the success of vote-allocation strategies and tactical voting. The multi-member district system has had a far-reaching influence on the development of party politics in Taiwan's democratization process.
The "brilliant" performances seen in the legislative election campaign so far can be seen as the farewell number of the multi-member district system.
Wang Yeh-lih is a professor of political science at Tunghai University.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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