In the past, the pan-green camp were masters at using public mobilization to support their candidates at election time, while the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) did all it could to calm down the electoral fervor. This clearly intimates that the opposition generally tries to intensify the campaign climate, while the incumbent government wants to cool things down.
Nevertheless, following the first transfer of government power in 2000, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) continued to heat up the atmosphere by mobilizing the public.
At the time, then-Taipei mayor Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) criticized the DPP, saying that “the master of the house should not be playing around.”
It is clear that the KMT’s political support base has shrunk and that the party therefore needs to stimulate ideological awareness in order to win back supporters.
Who wins and who loses an election depends on many factors, but personal contact networks, a candidate’s image, the party image and ideology are most important. The earliest elections in Taiwan were decided through personal networks, which meant local factions controlled the elections. The factions, however, were dependent on political power.
The KMT was in power for a long time and the party led the government, so during this period, the KMT also controlled the elections. The opposition at the time was weak and had to rely on ideological awareness to break through the KMT’s networks of contacts.
As time passed, the power of the political factions waned and in some areas they even collapsed. There were many reasons why the DPP would take over in some areas, but the most important reason was that the local factions were weakened. The most obvious example is Kaohsiung City where most of the political power was controlled by the Chen (陳), Wang (王) and Chu (朱) families. When their influenced waned, so did the KMT’s.
Although the DPP relied on political ideology to break the KMT’s contact networks, it was still politically weaker. In 2000, the DPP won the election because of a split in the KMT. However, its support base was still smaller than the KMT’s, so it had to continue to rely on political ideology to win votes. If the election climate cooled, factors such as contact networks, candidate image and political image would determine the election outcome, but if ideological opposition was intensified, that would overshadow the other factors.
In the 2004 presidential election, the DPP was finally strong enough to take on the KMT. The reason was that excessive Chinese pressure allowed the DPP to play up political ideology, which overshadowed all other factors. Beginning in 2005, the DPP’s image deteriorated and many swing voters felt the party had become corrupt. The party once again began to rely on public mobilization to bolster it’s campaigns and to fire up ideological opposition to stimulate supporters and get them to vote.
The red shirt movement helped the DPP build momentum in Kaohsiung City and successfully turn DPP candidate Chen Chu’s (陳菊) campaign around, giving her the win, but apart from that, there were no major changes in the other elections.
The support for the dangwai movement and the early DPP was far weaker than for the KMT, so the DPP relied on intensified ideological opposition to diminish the importance of other electoral factors. Between 2005 and 2008, the DPP used the same tactic, but this time supporters would not vote because the party’s image had deteriorated.
After Ma came to power in 2008, public disappointment in the government and a lackluster performance of the KMT governments in Taipei City and County and Taichung City resulted in poor election performance. However, KMT supporters would not vote for DPP candidates, so instead they abstained from voting altogether. The KMT has therefore emulated the DPP and begun to rely on political ideology to force its supporters to the ballot box despite their dissatisfaction.
As the times change, so do the fortunes of political parties. It is now the KMT central government that relies on public mobilization, a sign that support is dwindling. The KMT has always enjoyed higher support than the DPP in Taipei City and County and in Taichung City, but dissatisfaction with the KMT’s performance on both the national and local levels has made supporters unwilling to come out and vote, placing the KMT at risk of losing all these three areas in Saturday’s elections.
The reason the KMT is now relying on public mobilization is to make those supporters that are dissatisfied with the Ma administration come out and vote.
Chen Mao-hsiung is a former professor at National Sun Yat-sen University.
TRANSLATED BY PERRY SVENSSON
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