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DPP must rebuild from the bottom

In a polarized political climate, the implementation of the single district, two-vote election format has had two consequences. First, it ensures party political accountability. Second, the winner-takes-all set up has lead to a wide divergence between number of seats won and number of votes obtained, as parties won by small margins in some of the constituencies.

Confronted with circumstances that favored well organized operations and local factional support, the DPP had taken deep-green ideology as an opiate promising success -- from infighting and anti-pan-blue nominations during party primaries, to selecting the deep-green ideological path and reinforcing the opposition between the pan-green and pan-blue camps during the election campaign. The single district format is not the main reason for the DPP's failure; the true fault lies in the inability to disassemble the Chinese Nationalist Party's (KMT) tight management of local factions.

The KMT's management model is the product of mechanisms based on extensive local factional networks controlling not only local finance and the development of various social organizations, but also mutual cooperation between local representatives and government bodies and a sharing of operational resources.

Such an intricately woven mechanism of local government and finance dominates local organizations and operates as a territorial, political, financial and private interest network mobilized by the relationship between government and business.

Although local factions have showed signs of weakening in recent years, once such a complex, overlapping and personally intimate network begins to churn, its output still guarantees KMT electoral success. The dominion of local politics constructed through this network by the KMT was rejuvenated in these legislative elections.

Tactics such as "walking fees," electoral banquets, travel and gifts all rely on this intricate network for maximum effect. This election produced a record-setting 6,511 cases of vote-buying, with a total of 12,372 individuals implicated, of which 51 cases and 232 individuals have been indicted. This more or less provides insight into how the single district electoral system enhances the operational characteristics of local factional networks.

Since the DPP came to power in 2000, the party has attempted to counter the cooperation between the KMT's party apparatus and local factions by a top-down resource distribution system.

This enforced the local operations of individual district candidates and created a situation where the two parties learned from one another at an organizational level, so that the two parties' electoral district management methods and the offensive character of promotional materials are now developing along the same lines.

Faced with the single district system, which highlights the importance of localized operations and competition, the DPP's district candidates had long since descended into their respective localities in an attempt to break through the KMT's line of defense. However, a short-term effort is obviously not as effective as long-term investment at a fundamental level.

At the same time, idealistic candidates were trapped in the deep abyss of pan-green and pan-blue opposition, unable to escape and also unable to alter their ideological banner. The manipulation of deep-green ideological fault lines limited the possible development of party visions on Taiwan's future and obscured the depth of political ideals that candidates could expound.

Consequently, the election became bogged down in negative propaganda. In reality, the absence of detailed administration in electoral districts and the narrowness of political ideology so that the two cannot complement one another, are the main reasons behind the DPP's failure.

The DPP's electoral campaign strategy was originally created to correspond to the KMT's political mobilization, yet it ended up being confused and misled by the KMT's method of allocating political resources and thus ignored social trends. This explains why the DPP's electoral strategies in local districts failed to cut through the KMT's long-standing social networks, built upon political business relations, and also failed to deconstruct the correlations between local factions and the social network. As a result, local factions still remain strong and vote-buying prevalent.

The DPP's campaign advertisements also failed to follow public opinion or touch upon political issues relating to daily life and therefore only hung on to fundamental supporters. The DPP has long been numbed by its deep-green ideology and might have forgotten its original mission to solicit social support and respond to social trends.

Campaigning is like rowing upstream -- not to advance is to drop back. If the single member district, two vote system produces a mutual supervisory system between the ruling party and the opposition, the DPP should break up the complicated and deeply rooted political and business forces in local districts not only by starting out anew from the borough and village chief, township representative and city and county councilor levels, but also by building a social network of local organizations and individuals and rebuild grassroots organizations to consolidate changing social forces.

Shifting its focus back on to these fundamentals might be one of the ways forward for the DPP in response to the new electoral system.

Liu Dsih-chi is an associate professor in the Department of International Business at Asia University.

Translated by Angela Hong and Ted Yang
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