In the absence of major game changers, it will have to wait until the next president and legislature are elected in 2016 before there will be any changes to the political situation, which for a long time has been a source of great concern for many people. No matter how meaningful the outcomes of the year-end seven-in-one elections are, they cannot change the existing power balance at the national level, which makes them different from the mid-term elections in the US.
If nothing unexpected happens, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) will step down in dejection when his second term expires two years from now. No matter how often and how loud he repeats his tired old pledge to fight for the economy, it is a near impossibility that he will be able to turn things around, improve his dismal approval rating and rescue his historical legacy.
However, the majority of Taiwanese — who have disagreed with most of Ma’s policies over the years — are probably even more depressed than the Ma administration and its supporters. On major issues such as whether the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in Gongliao District (貢寮), New Taipei City (新北市), should be put into operation and whether the cross-strait service trade agreement should be renegotiated, people have been forced to watch as the Ma administration defies mainstream public opinion and steers a course that only pleases a handful of political and business elite.
What has brought about this dismal state of politics? The opposition that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) — which is in government and has a legislative majority — has encountered has been much weaker than the opposition the Democratic Progressive Party’s faced when it held the presidency. Regardless, the Ma administration mainly blames its inability to govern on legislative obstructionism by opposition parties and the inefficiency of the legislative process.
In this one-sided account of political accountability, the key to the dysfunction of Taiwanese politics lies in the legislative maneuvers that counter the majority. Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) is considered an accomplice of the opposition and guilty of blocking the nation from moving forward because he has not shown the same “determination” as Miaoli County Commissioner Liu Cheng-hung (劉政鴻) did when he forced through the demolition of four homes in Dapu Township (大埔).
Following the failed attempts to expel Wang from the KMT and the legislature during the “September strife” last year, the KMT’s caucus recently proposed a series of reforms intended to speed up the legislative process. These included establishing a security force for the legislature; a change to the one chairman rule for committees; raising the threshold for forming a caucus; and tightening the conditions and time frame for proposing inter-caucus negotiations.
Perhaps these reform proposals, which directly or indirectly punish minority parties, should not be dismissed simply a way for the KMT to shirk responsibility while pretending that it is actually doing something. The heavy responsibility of unified government cannot be lightly shifted to the opposition.
However, if the KMT forces through a rewriting of the legislature’s rules, will that end all the Ma administration’s problems and enable it to fully utilize its abilities for the remainder of Ma’s term?
What changes would such a rewriting bring for the nation’s democracy?
Commissioning, and deploying when necessary, a security force in the Legislative Yuan has been a longstanding KMT proposal for legislative reform.
Setting aside for the moment a discussion of whether it is possible to improve the courtesy or etiquette of a democratic legislature by modeling legislative ethics on how schoolchildren are disciplined in an authoritarian culture, using such force to remove lawmakers physically filibustering legislative proposals would probably only allow the majority party’s legislators to retain their dignity by giving them control over the speaker’s podium without even having to make an effort.
The rules for committees and inter-caucus negotiations are fraught with problems and require a complete overhaul, which would hopefully strike an appropriate balance between professional deliberation and party politics as well as between majority rule and minority rights. The problem is that making or changing the rules of the representative democracy process has its share of the agency problem: Those in power often promote their own interests in the name, and sometimes even at the expense, of the public interest. Behind their lofty words, the elites often try to manipulate the rules to benefit themselves or hinder their competitors.
Is a legislative reform proposal that aims to disqualify minor parties from participating in inter-caucus talks, to deprive the opposition of the limited power they have under the current rules over the committee agenda and to diminish the time available for reaching political compromise or building transpartisan consensus really an attempt at implementing democratic majority rule or is it actually an attempt to institutionalize a democracy-distorting, winner-take-all politic?
People have to be vigilant to see the difference.
Contemporary representative democracy is a political process that cycles back and forth between election and governance. Winner-takes-all is at most an electoral rule that is barely acceptable or respectable, but as a rule for governance it simply is not compatible with democratic justice. Someone who has lost an election is still a full member of the democratic community and should not have to settle for being ruled. The one-time majority party does not necessarily have a clear-cut electoral mandate to do whatever it wants, nor does it represent the majority of the people on every public policy issue of the day. Besides, in realpolitik, the true winners could well consist of a very small ruling class — those in the top 1 percent.
During the four-year presidential and legislative terms, public support for the ruling and opposition parties may well change. The opposition parties’ filibusters could safeguard the majority policy positions and it could instead be the ruling party, rejecting change and compromise, that tries to dictate against the will of the majority.
Once people recognize the rigidity and falsehood of winner-takes-all politics, they will understand that deliberation, power struggle and compromise in the legislative process are not necessarily obstacles to democratic majority rule, but rather are necessary steps for ascertaining the majority will in a democratic society.
If the ruling party does not understand this, the policy setbacks it encounters are precisely what it deserves.
Su Yen-tu is an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institutum Iurisprudentiae.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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