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" (
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 (
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.
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