The general election in Taiwan is upon us. These are concurrent elections for president (by nationwide plurality) and assembly (by MMM). For those who, like me, wish for more coverage of the legislative contests, a post at Frozen Garlic (Nathan Batto) is the place to go.
I will just pull out a few particularly interesting points; quoted passages below are from the linked Frozen Garlic post.
While there are three candidates running for the presidency, and polls have shown even third place could break 20%, the district (nominal) races for the legislature are mostly DPP vs. KMT. So while the presidential winner is likely to be under 50% (and polls generally have that as Lai, the DPP candidate), most district winners will need a majority of votes. Thus the voters who stick with the TPP candidate will be crucial to the legislative outcome.
The key will be how TPP voters break in the legislative races. The TPP has not nominated a candidate in most districts, so most Ko supporters will have to choose between a KMT and DPP legislative candidate. Four years ago, most TPP party list voters supported the DPP district candidate. This year it seems likely that more of them will go for the KMT candidate. In short, there probably aren’t going to be enough votes for many of the DPP candidates.
There are few really safe seats.
Since Taiwan started using this new electoral system in 2008, most of the 73 district seats have changed parties at one point or another. I tallied it up a few years ago, and I don’t remember the exact result, but it was something like only 20 or 25 seats had never changed parties. And many of those saw at least one very close election.
The implication is that there is a decent chance of the outcome being divided government in the strong sense of that term: a president of one party, an assembly majority of a different party. If so, this could result in cohabitation but would not guarantee it. The system is semi-presidential; cohabitation means a premier of a party opposed to the president, with the president’s party not in the cabinet. However, Taiwan has the president-parliamentary subtype, which gives the president more leverage over the composition of cabinets–critically by giving the president the constitutional authority to dismiss a premier and cabinet. Thus a potential DPP president would not necessarily have to acquiesce to the preferred premier of a potential KMT majority, although keeping in office a premier undesirable to a KMT assembly majority would be difficult, due to the possibility of a no-confidence vote.
Fruits and Votes 
It appears that your prediction has come true. Lai Ching-te, the DPP candidate, won with 40% of the vote to 33.5% for Hou (KMT) and 26.5% for Ko (TPP). However, in the legislative election, the DPP won only 51 seats to 52 for the KMT, 8 for the TPP, and two independents (one in the indigenous district and one ex-KMT member who ran without KMT opposition). All of the TPP’s victories were on the list, where they won 22% of the vote to 35% for the KMT and 36% for the DPP. In the single-member district tier, the TPP’s 10 candidates won just 3% to 45% for the DPP and 40% for the KMT. The result leaves the TPP with the balance of power in the assembly: I’m unsure if Ko would be prepared to form a coalition with the DPP, but it would be theoretically possible.
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Not quite, as the KMT has a (slight) plurality, not a majority in the legislature–thus not meeting my strict definition of divided government. More importantly, I would guess this almost completely rules out a cohabitation cabinet.
Batto points out that there was not much strategic voting: the TPP held on to most of its voters. In fact, if we compare to the final poll aggregate (1 Jan.) we see the TPP presidential candidate (Ko) slightly over performed (26.5% instead of 24%). Yet Lai beat the poll aggregate by a substantial margin (40% vs. 36%).
Batto also notes that Ko’s coattails were good: the TPP won 22.1% of the party-list vote. I’d add that this is especially impressive in that the party had so few candidates in the districts, and therefore could not benefit from “contamination” effects. It certainly reinforced how “presidentialized” the party is–as I suggested before the election. That is, it is dependent on a strong performance by its presidential candidate, and while he finished third, greater than a quarter of the vote is pretty strong.
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So Taiwan is now using parallel voting, is that right? (I saw that you said MMM, I was curious the sub-type). Wiki says 73 single-district seats, 34 by party-list PR, and 6 by SNTV (apparently for the indigenous?) As I understand it Taiwan used to use purely FPTP but added the list seats recently?
Is there some kind of historical reason as to why Asian countries like parallel voting so much? Japan of course, and if I’m not mistaken South Korea also switched over to it relatively recently
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Mixed-member majoritarian, in which the seats of the list component are allocated “in parallel” rather than in a “compensatory” manner (as with MMP). Some scholars use “parallel system” as a synonym for “MMM” but should not, as there are other possible ways that two overlapping components of a system can be allocated in parallel. (Guatemala and Niger have both district list-PR and a nationwide list district, but not compensatory, for example.)
Taiwan does indeed still have a few seats allocated by SNTV for indigenous. The old system for the Legislative Yuan was SNTV, not FPTP. There was a small list component (parallel), but it was mostly SNTV.
Your question is an interesting one. We could ask the same about SNTV, as Japan, Taiwan, and at one time South Korea all had SNTV for their main legislative chamber. I suspect the main answer has to do with the legacy of fairly weak national parties (one could argue this does not fit KMT but I am not going to entertain that puzzle right now). MMM is the system you want if you are trying to maintain dominance of regional groups over national parties, while doing away with the challenges of intra-party competition and possible vote-distribution and nomination errors. On the other hand, MMP is much more nationalizing (arguably even if the compensation is not itself nationwide, like the Bolivian and Scottish versions).
South Korea’s change that took effect in 2020 was only partially away from MMM/parallel.
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