The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) have announced their respective legislator-at-large nominee lists. Compared with previous lists for these two major parties, there are differences worth noting.
For the DPP, there are a number of minor changes to its list, suggesting that the party has yet to address issues of local factional influence in the distribution of names.
On the KMT side, while the factional influence is less apparent, it does seem to derive more from the agenda of a select few.
The inclusion of a few extremely contentious names — including party Chairman Wu Den-yih (吳敦義), who originally placed himself at No. 8 on the list — drew robust pushback from within party ranks.
After some deliberations, Wu was moved down to No. 10, before further falling to No. 14 in the final version passed during a provisional session of the KMT’s Central Standing Committee.
However, this did not end the internal squabbling, and there is every possibility that the infighting would continue even after the election.
The system of legislators-at-large was originally introduced to alleviate the problem of insufficient representativeness of constituency seats, but it has had the added benefit of acting as a channel in which new political talent could cut their teeth.
As a result, the two parties’ lists are often either manipulated by internal party factionalism or are controlled by a few influential individuals.
This phenomenon is hardly exclusive to party politics in Taiwan, as the same issues arise in any country in which elections employ a form of proportional representation, whether this be a proportional representation system, a mixed member proportional or a parallel voting single-district, two-votes system.
To address the problem of factional influence or the concentration of influence in a small group of individuals within a party, some countries have implemented either an open list or a free list proportional representation system, opposed to the legislators-at-large closed list proportional representation system used in Taiwan.
In the latter, voters are asked to circle the name of the political party, and the number of seats allotted to the party is subsequently decided by the number of party votes received.
The seats are then allotted to the legislator-at-large nominees in accordance with their placement on the party’s nominee list. With the open and free list systems, the order in which the candidates are elected is not set in advance.
The open list format allows voters to circle the names of the provided candidates to indicate a preferred order in which they would be elected.
In the free list format, voters can distribute their votes across different party lists, with as many votes as there are seats to be filled in that electoral district, with the option of block voting or even casting all of their votes to a single candidate, in what is called a panachage system. With the free list proportional representation system, each voter is allowed multiple votes.
Although the open and free list systems go some way to addressing the problems of factional or individual influence, they are not without a downside: They tend to only benefit high-profile contenders, and political parties will therefore tend to nominate these types of candidates to maximize the number of votes they receive.
This has the effect of putting new, lesser-known candidates, or those with a specialist background, at a disadvantage, making it more difficult for them to get their foot in the door.
The free list proportional representation system is complicated, both in terms of voting and of counting the ballots, and Taiwanese voters are unfamiliar with this format, so it would be difficult to implement here.
However, the most practical way for implementing the legislator-at-large voting procedure is to continue with the current closed list proportional representation system, but with a little help from the media.
They could take a proactive approach in educating the electorate to refuse to cast their ballots for political parties that field controversial legislator-at-large nominees, which would in turn affect the number of votes these parties receive.
Of course, at present, Taiwan does not have a system in which smaller parties can band together and recommend joint lists of legislator-at-large nominees, and this is unlikely to change in the near future, given the dominance of the two main parties in the legislature.
This is a pity, because this would be one way in which the two major parties could be induced to stop introducing contentious nominee lists.
William Yang is a professor at Shih Hsin University’s public policy and management department.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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