The Penghu gambling referendum on Sept. 26, 2009, is the only referendum that has been passed since the legislature enacted the Referendum Act (公民投票法) in 2003, even though for all practical purposes this particular referendum is not actually applicable to the act. This is an ironic outcome, especially in light of the fact that, at the same time, a social movement launched a referendum demanding that the government renegotiate a beef trade deal with the US. The referendum proposal was eventually killed by the excessively high threshold in the second stage of petitioning, while the Taiwan Solidarity Union’s referendum on the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) was annihilated in the review process by the Cabinet’s Referendum Commission. Time and again, it has been proven that the Referendum Act is a dead end.
How do we solve this seemingly unsolvable issue? Amending the Referendum Act is one possible route. The double threshold for petitioning must be lowered, doing away with limitations on the number of votes needed to pass, and making sure the Referendum Commission returns to procedural inspections only. Moreover, the government should help in the process of reviewing and accepting referendums. These proposals do not usually cause dispute, yet they are unable to gain traction in the legislature. The biggest problem is not in the legislation itself, but rather in how Taiwanese independence----unification politics are declared and represented.
Besides referendums being bound directly to general elections and disputes over the president initiating politically manipulated defensive referendums, referendums and the issue of self-determination have overlapped since the Referendum Act was passed. Hence, the debate over referendums is typically not conducted in the context of strengthening the democratic system. Instead of asking how referendums can mend the inefficiencies of representative democracy, the question is how referendums can speed up the development of Taiwanese independence. Isn’t the performance of the administration of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) a conspicuous warning?
Unrestrained dualistic -unification-independence hostilities are nothing new in the history of Taiwan’s democracy. Unification-independence politics have been acted out upon the political stage to stifle democracy, such as a debate over the direct election of the president, or a plan to disenfranchise districts in national elections. The outcome is that Ma, who is shifting the focus from independence to unification, can win a landslide victory in direct presidential elections and the reactionaries who advocated indirect elections have become the beneficiaries of direct elections.
Therefore, in amending the Referendum Act, we must return to popular self-government as a core value, allowing the Referendum Act to provide referendums that are for the public and focus on public policy, so that Taiwan’s referendum democracy can develop and offer relief to a representative democracy that is becoming inept. This sort of bottom-up philosophy will inevitably abolish the rights of the president and the legislature to initiate referendums, reducing and limiting politicians’ ability to manipulate politics, and it will serve to expand the freedom and will of the public to initiate referendums. All of these things must occur to finally avoid the use of unification-independence discourse to smother Taiwan’s democracy.
Hsu Yung-ming is an assistant professor of political science at Soochow University.
Translated by Kyle Jeffcoat
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