Considering all the problems that President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) government has run into since she took office, she must be feeling frustrated about why, despite trying so hard, she is finding it so difficult to advance her policies. She has spent much of her energy handling emergencies, and the vitality one would expect from a new administration is sorely lacking.
The problems faced by the Cabinet of Tsai and Premier Lin Chuan (林全) arise from a number of factors. The government faces a double-lame-duck situation and a double paradox of political ethics. The administration has been hijacked, and they are asking people from within the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) party-state apparatus to handle transitional justice and clear up the party-state apparatus, which is a contradictory approach.
When the elected head of an administration remains in office, but will not be able to serve a subsequent term, bureaucrats in subordinate positions might become negligent, act contrary to laws and regulations, or just do nothing. This state of affairs is known as a lame-duck government. To ensure that administrative operations continue seamlessly, Tsai and Lin have retained a large number of political appointees and civil servants left over from the previous administration, which is contrary to the way that government handovers are normally handled in democratic nations.
Furthermore, these officials know that they will not remain in office for long, as do their subordinates. This gives rise to an interesting phenomenon in which Tsai and Lin expect to remain in office for a long time, but their officials might not be in their positions for long.
This is the opposite of the normal lame-duck situation in democracies, where it is the top leaders who do not remain in office for long and their subordinates become uncooperative. What is more, the subordinates also know that they will not be in office for long, producing a double-lame-duck situation in which the subordinates are uncooperative.
There is a double paradox of political ethics and individual academic ethics. According to political reason, the appointees in Lin’s Cabinet should carry out the political platforms of Tsai’s pan-green Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). However, if they do so, it would give rise to two paradoxes.
The first is that if political appointees who were appointed by former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) pan-blue KMT government can carry out and formulate “green” policies, it suggests that Tsai’s policies are the same as Ma’s, which would explain why she can use the same appointees. It could imply that political power has not really passed from one party to another, and that Tsai has been fooling the voters and is really a pan-blue leader.
If these political appointees change their ways by formulating and implementing pan-green policies, that is tantamount to negating the policies they formulated under the previous administration.
Such a course of action negates the convictions and principles by which they formulated policies under the Ma government and negates their loyalty to the previous government as pan-blue appointees.
From the aspect of personal political ethics, if such an official has served under the former and current governments, with their different principles, and formulated two different and conflicting sets of policies, it means that the official’s ego under Tsai and Lin’s government negates their ego under Ma’s government. This would be a conflict of convictions with regard to the official’s academic principles.
This kind of change or non-change of policies negates the officials’ loyalty to the Tsai-Lin administration and the Ma administration, forming a paradox of degree of loyalty to the different parties and governments, while policy changes also present a paradox of inconsistent academic principles.
Although retaining officials from the previous administration is good for continuity of government business and quickly getting the new administration on track, this way of thinking about work efficiency has a blind spot in terms of logic. Political appointees are not necessarily familiar with administrative affairs, because they take up and leave their posts according to changing policies.
This is true of political appointees in general, so if Ma’s appointees can implement policies, why cannot those appointed by the DPP government?
As for civil servants, if it is really necessary to retain them or even make them political appointees, and if it only by doing so is possible to maintain the continuity of government business and get the new administration on track quickly, then what happens when they are eventually replaced?
That will cause the same kind of difficulty as seen with the current series of appointments, namely that replacing people creates a gap in governance. Does that mean that these people can never be replaced, and does it mean that the Tsai-Lin government has no solution for the problem of civil servants’ administrative neutrality?
Tsai has overlooked her mission of resolving Taiwan’s abnormal party-state complex. Ma’s presidency was to some extent a restoration of the party-state system. An important job for Tsai following her election victory was to deal with the unjust party-state system and implement transitional justice, but the host of Ma-era officials she has appointed are surely not the right people to handle that task.
All these problems arise from the abnormal way in which Tsai has formed her Cabinet.
Lin Shiou-jeng is an associate professor in Chung Chou University of Science and Technology’s department of marketing and logistics management.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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