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Success brings growing pains for DPP

After years of operating at the margins of political power, with a small membership and insolvency a frequent problem, the DPP has entered a new world after its election victory on March 18 -- one its party structure might not be ready for.

Since the presidential election, party membership has risen 50 percent, from 200,000 to 300,000 members and looks set to rise even further. The reason for this rush of support? By becoming the party in power, the DPP has gained immense powers of patronage and, of course, influence over government spending. The DPP has suddenly become the party for the politically ambitious to join.

Meanwhile established figures within the party now find themselves close to real power, and some are believed to be seeking to promote their influence in less-than-scrupulous ways.

The problem concerns the uses and abuses of "nominal members" (人頭黨員), known in Chinese as "head members."

Nominal members are members recruited by a faction boss or politician with a view to increasing their influence in the party. Nominal members have little or no interest in the party themselves, rather they are a vote bank on which the politically ambitious can draw.

"We are very worried about nominal members, who are easily controlled by people maneuvering to change the DPP's power structure," said DPP's organizational development director Jimmy Kuo (郭俊銘).

The support of nominal members is obtained by simply paying them, a process known in Chinese as "feeding the head" (養人頭), and those who control these vote banks are known as "head masters" (人頭大戶).

The problem of nominal members comes about from a convergence of DPP organizational procedures -- in particular the tendency of poorly-funded township level offices to fall under the control of local factions -- the DPP platform itself, and the party's regulations.

According to the nominating regulations for DPP candidates, all paid up members of one year's standing are allowed to vote for nominating the party's candidates.

This voting constitutes half of the candidate selection process, the other half being the results of a public opinion poll on prospective candidates conducted by the party headquarters.

Since it is extremely difficult to influence the public opinion poll part of the selection process, anyone ambitious enough to make their way as a DPP candidate is, therefore, wise to make sure that they do as well as they possibly can in the voting by party members. Hence the reason to acquire vote banks of nominal members.

And since many party members recruited at the township level use the local party office as their contact address and phone number for party purposes, it is impossible for party headquarters to get in touch to establish whether they are active party members or simply nominal members.

Now that the DPP has power and influence, it has also had a rush of new members, especially from central and southern Taiwan. Kuo says that 20,000 of the new members come from Tainan county alone. But the membership increase has been felt in other areas as well.

One problem is that many of these might be nominal members used by ambitious politicians to muscle their way into senior party posts and positions of influence.

Another worry is that many of these new members might be nominal members recruited by the KMT in an effort to influence the formulation of DPP policy. Since the new members cannot yet vote, their influence has yet to be felt. But this has left senior DPP officials wondering if they are sitting on a time bomb.

Lawmaker Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁) is frank about the process: "DPP officials `feed many heads' to compete with their rivals during the nomination process."

But it can be far more complex than that. Kuo told the Taipei Times that in the case of Kaohsiung Mayor Frank Hsieh (謝長廷), several KMT city councilors have actively recruited nominal members for Hsieh as a gesture of "goodwill." As a result Hsieh, who generally has an exceptionally clean record, has been called a "head master" by DPP colleagues.

One person lobbying the party for changes which would curtail the manipulation of nominal members is former DPP national Assembly caucus leader Chen Chin-te (陳金德).

Ilan-based Chen plans to run in the next legislative elections but has recently seen his chances of selection as a candidate plummet as rivals quickly recruited new party members to support their own bids.

"If the DPP doesn't rectify its nomination procedures to avoid influence of nominal members, the quality of the party's makeup will fall just as its administrative skills are improving" said Chen.

Membership quality is not as easy as it sounds. Rather the main concern is to keep out opportunistic KMT renegades seeking new influence, some of whom are likely to have "black gold" (黑金) backgrounds.

Take independent lawmaker Tsai Hau (蔡豪) for example. Tsai is reported to have a vote bank of 4,800 DPP members in Pingtung County and is likely to be actively involved in the nominations for DPP candidates in next year's elections for legislators and county commissioners.

Acknowledging this fact, DPP chairman Lin Yi-Hsiung (林義雄) showed his anxiety at a recent dinner with reporters.

"The situation [of nominal members] is worsening," he said. "but their influence will be diluted if large numbers of independent members join and party membership can exceed one million," he said.

However, how quickly the DPP might reach such a size, if at all, is anyone's guess.

"DPP factions plan to amend party nominating regulations to avoid members with sullied records influencing nomination and internal election procedures," Kuo said.

The plan, Kuo said, would lower the weighting of the voting of party members and increase that of the opinion survey rate in candidate selection.

Another resolution has been advocated by legislator Shen Fu-hsiung (沈富雄), namely to let the government hold the primary election instead of the party, much like the system in the US.
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