This spring Taiwan’s political consciousness reawakened with the flourishing of the student-led Sunflower movement. The Sunflowers may also be planting seeds for the further development of the garden of democracy in this fertile nation. As they plant seeds, here are three they might consider nurturing.
First, a true democracy chooses and elects candidates via elections that are perceived as fair, providing equal opportunities to all stakeholders. This point dovetails with two issues. One is how parties in Taiwan choose their candidates to contest public office and the other is the current state of regulations for campaign financing in Taiwan’s general elections.
Akin to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the nation’s political parties choose their candidates behind closed doors. The rules for choosing these candidates often change conveniently from election to election and from constituency to constituency. Yes, parties claim to use polls of Taiwanese preferences to measure the electability and popularity of potential candidates, but this is a severely flawed modus operandi for the following reasons.
One, public opinion polls can be easily manipulated. A very simple example occurs when a candidate is the first on a list of options. This candidate will receive a higher percentage of approval as a result of being the first mentioned. Another flaw is that a poll is not an election. Winning a popularity contest that is measured by pollsters when nothing is debated or communicated with the public is a far cry from winning an election.
However, electing candidates through party nomination elections or conventions is a test run for the general electoral process. A candidate who wins the party’s nomination through an electoral voting process proves they have the ability to attract voters with public welfare policies, organize an electoral campaign and mobilize support on election day, all critical requirements for winning a general election.
If the US had used public opinion polls some past presidents would never have made it to the Oval Office, including former US presidents John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan.
Unregulated campaign financing for general elections is a vexing issue that the US and Taiwan share, whereas Canada and the UK have regulated financing and spending, which levels the campaign battlefield.
The right-wing parties of the US and Taiwan are supported by the wealthy and have little difficulty. The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is often said to be the “richest political party in the world” and has access to an obscene amount of money. The opposition claims these finances were assets of the state, which the KMT embezzled during the nearly 40 years of the Martial Law era. The left-wing US Democratic Party and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) are underfunded in comparison, making a fair and equal electoral process unlikely.
In Canada and the UK there are strict fundraising and spending limits both on individual candidates and party spending, and it is limited to a relatively short electoral campaign window. However, in Taiwan, campaign billboards and activities could be seen at least a year before the polls — due in late 2014.
Advertising works; if it was not effective it would not invade every corner of our daily lives. With unlimited spending political parties can literally buy their way to victory, and there is nothing democratic about purchasing the presidency of a country.
The money politics game played in Taiwan also gives de facto control of the KMT’s legislators to the chairman of the KMT and not the president, as the chairman controls the nomination process and the fruit available on the election money tree, making legislators more beholden to the chairman of their party and less to their constituents. This is most likely why President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), months after winning the presidency, reneged on his campaign promise not to become the chairman of his party.
The second issue that Taiwan and the US share actually originated in the US system. This is the gerrymandering of electoral districts to ensure that certain parties can never gain electoral seats in proportion to their votes, ie, fulfill the democratic wishes of the majority. The Democratic Party in the US along with the DPP must garner far more votes than their respective opponents in the US Republican Party and KMT to win an equal number of elected representatives. These are clearly undemocratic processes that must be remedied with a bipartisan electoral constituency redistribution commission.
Finally, the current system of electing a percentage of legislators via proportional vote representation can be beneficial to lesser yet popular parties unable to win individual first-past-the-post contests, such as the Greens, Taiwan Solidarity Union and the People First Party. These legislators can represent the public at large, but the KMT, in its current attempt to evict Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) from the party and the legislature, claims he is beholden to the party that nominated him and not the citizens who voted for him.
The stance of the KMT is that although Taiwanese cast ballots for a party’s list of legislators-at-large, the winning candidates are not representatives of the people but pawns of their respective political parties. This is clearly not representative democracy, but an attempt by the chairman of a political party to interfere in Taiwan’s democratic process. Clearly, another issue for the aforementioned multi-partisan electoral reform commission.
Taiwan has walked a long and difficult road to this garden of democracy and it is still a young and immature garden, so hopefully Taiwanese can work together to plant new seeds for fair democratic processes.
With a little nurturing, all Taiwanese will flourish on Ilha Formosa.
Wayne Pajunen is a political analyst and commentator.
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