In discussions about how much room there is for People First Party (PFP) Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) to launch a presidential bid, some commentators have cited Academia Sinica academic Hu Fu’s (胡佛) division of political issues into three aspects: national identification, constitutional system and public policy. Expanding on Hu’s theory, they say that at election time, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) supporters vote for a country or state, making the party strongly exclusivist and its supporters closely united. Supporters of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), however, vote for a government, they say, making the party less exclusive and its supporters more loosely connected. According to this Taipei-centric line of reasoning, Soong’s bid might severely damage the KMT’s campaign.
Other commentators say that despite the vicious struggles between the pan-blue and pan-green camps, more than half of all voters have no specific political stance and could thus be said to be swing voters. This, they say, is why there is still room for Soong’s bid.
Many pan-blue and pan-green commentators have based their analysis on this typical Taipei discourse. However, regardless of whether the conclusion that Soong’s bid is unfavorable to the KMT is correct, this line of reasoning itself is based on a series of biases.
First, the claim that DPP supporters vote for a “country” in elections might be right. However, the claim that KMT supporters vote for a -“government” rather than a “country” is only true for the party’s Taiwan-centric factions. Members of these factions were born during the Martial Law era and make up the individual retinues of the group of local followers created by the past authoritarian KMT government. Most of the supporters of local KMT factions do not vote for any public policies. Rather, they are mobilized through vote-buying to support a booty-sharing system.
Those who were loyal to the authoritarian government and deep-blue supporters felt that former president Lee Teng-hui’s (李登輝) Taiwan-centric policies and democratization would destroy both party and country. The New Party capitalized on those fears and its supporters are now those with the strongest tendency to vote for a “country,” and they are much more exclusionary than DPP supporters have ever been. They have constantly shifted camps between the New Party, the PFP and President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) camp since 2000, and their purpose is to elect a leader who can protect their imaginary country best.
When Hu said that elections are held to elect a government, he meant that voters should cast their ballots based on the public policies advocated by a political party. If that is true, then, as most DPP supporters in the 1990s were from the middle class and owned small and medium-sized companies, they voted both for a country and for democratic reform. This was clearly different from most countries, where voters generally vote for public policies focused on the distribution of resources. Following the 2000 elections, the DPP has lost its middle-class supporters, but, driven by economic nationalism as a reaction to globalization and the industrial relocation to China, farmers and workers living in poverty have moved toward the party. Since 2009, the DPP has maintained its stance of Taiwan as an independent and sovereign state, as stated in the Resolution on Taiwan’s Future, while also working to narrow the income gap between rich and poor. As a result, the party’s supporters now vote both for country and government. Thus, the view that Taiwanese elections focus only on the unification or independence issue, rather than resource distribution, is shallow.
The middle class and swing voters are often seen as a “refined” group in Taiwan. This has led to two other discourses.
The first deals with the view that the middle class despize the unification-independence issue. This view does not hold water, because in the 1990s, the bulk of the DPP’s supporters were made up of the middle class, professionals and small and medium-sized company owners, rather than farmers and workers. It was precisely during this period that support for the DPP’s pro-independence stance expanded the fastest, which disproves this line of reasoning.
The second specious discourse is the view that a political party’s support base can be determined by looking at the smallest grassroots elections, such as the borough chief elections. Sixty percent of borough chiefs are independent candidates, which according to this line of reasoning is seen as evidence that over half of all Taiwanese voters are swing voters — offering a great opportunity for Soong. The blind spot in this discourse lies in the fact that, following Taiwan’s political democratization and normalization, local politics is more about issues such as bridges and roads and less about political ideology, meaning local politics focus less on political parties. That 60 percent of borough chiefs are independents is completely irrelevant to the increase in the number of swing voters. On the contrary, as political normalization continues to deepen, ideologies involving resource distribution will boost party politics in higher-level elections, likely resulting in a declining number of swing voters.
This is why the British and German liberal parties, which both appeal to swing voters, are only the third-largest parties in their countries. After Taiwan’s national politics developed into a two-party system, the number of swing voters has declined so much that it is very difficult for smaller parties such as the Liberal Party and the Green Party to survive. If there is room for Soong’s bid, swing voters will not be key, although they will remain important. Instead, the key is Ma’s incompetence and those who think that the DPP is not attractive enough.
Lin Cho-shui is a Democratic Progressive Party legislative candidate.
Translated By Eddy Chang
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