Taiwan election result and what’s next

The election results and what’s next

I am sharing the above post by Nathan Batto at Frozen Garlic because it says so much that is of interest to readers of this blog. Nathan explains why the result is not quite divided government and almost certainly will not produce cohabitation, and thus the president–while lacking a legislative majority and in fact facing a KMT plurality–still likely will control the executive (via appointing an ally as premier) and not be too seriously checked.

There is also a comment from me, which I will reproduce here:

On the executive scenarios, I agree, from my comparative executives perspective. Taiwan has the president-parliamentary variant of semi-presidentialism, which gives the president much more leverage over appointment of a premier and cabinet formation.

At least as of 2009 or so, when David Samuels and I finished our book, Presidents, Parties, and Prime Ministers, there was only one case of cohabitation in a president-parliamentary system. It was in Sri Lanka, and I do not remember the particulars. We discuss the Taiwan cases of “divided government” (a party or pre-electoral alliance opposed to the president winning a majority in the legislature).

However, a case of divided government arising from a concurrent election, had it happened in this election, might be exactly a scenario in which cohabitation would occur. So I agree with you.

(We define cohabitation very strictly: president and premier from opposing parties, and the president’s party not in the cabinet.)

Taiwan 2024: Divided government?

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.

How China Shapes Taiwan’s Elections

I assume that readers of frozen garlic are more sophisticated about Taiwan than readers of the Economist, so this won’t be very surprising to anybody…

How China Shapes Taiwan’s Elections

Taiwan presidential debate–in English

Via Frozen Garlic (Nathan Batto), a link to a simultaneous translation into English of a recent presidential candidates’ debate in Taiwan.

The elections (both president and assembly) are on 13 January. According to the latest poll tracker at the Economist, the race currently stands at:

Lai Ching-te (DPP) 34%

Hou Yu-ih (KMT) 31%

Ko Wen-je (TPP) 21%.

Ranges of these estimates are 28–40, 26–36, and 17–26, respectively. It thus has continued to trend more towards a two-way race with “coordination” of the opposition to the DPP (party of incumbent president) around Hou, but with Ko’s support seemingly having stabilized, at least for now, around 20%. The race between the top two has closed a bit recently, not only from Hou gaining but also from Lai slipping (from a high of 37% on 2 Dec.).

I previously addressed the coordination question and the earlier attempt at a KMT–TPP alliance. And, as always, follow Nathan’s blog if you want excellent updated commentary from a political scientist based in Taiwan.

Taiwan update: Failed pre-electoral coordination triggering electoral coordination?

On 16 November I wrote about the plan by Taiwan’s opposition parties to present a joint ticket. It didn’t go well. The three-way contest continues, although the dynamic is becoming ever more two-way. The president is elected by plurality. The election will take place on 13 January, concurrent with an assembly election.

Consider these two screenshots from the poll tracker maintained by The Economist. In the first, I set the date to a week or so before the announcement of the intended alliance. In the second it is set to the most recent polling aggregate.

The candidates are: Lai Ching-te of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), Hou Yu-ih of the Kuomintang (KMT), and Ko Wen-je of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP).

What a change! While Lai has led for months, just before the alliance announcement it was an increasingly close three-way contest with Ko closing in on Hou. It was possibly a race in which unity might have assured the DPP’s defeat, although alliances probably rarely are as big as the sum of their parts–a problem I mentioned in the earlier planting. (The incumbent president is from this party.) Now it looks like a close two-candidate race in which the winner may be at less that 40% but that winner still could be the opposition KMT (Hou). In fact, another graph at The Economist shows Lai and Hou poll estimates with highly overlapping confidence intervals, but the TPP (Ko) and KMT confidence intervals well separated.

Or to put it in Gary Cox‘s terms, the race has transitioned from a potential non-Duvergerian equilibrium (in which it is not common knowledge which of two trailing and ideologically similar candidates is best placed to defeat a front-runner) to a more Duvergerian one (in which “coordination” occurs around the top two). Of course, the front-runner from the DPP may still win, if insufficient further Ko voters defect to Hou. Whether that would be a “coordination failure” depends on how many Ko voters actually had a clear preference for defeating Lai over staying with their first choice. And my general feeling is that real-world coordination failures are rarer than conventional “Duvergerian” logic about plurality contests expects them to be. What is especially striking about this case is that a failed attempt at coordination of the pre-electoral alliance variety seems to have triggered a move towards coordination of the electoral kind. Whether it is enough remains an open question. So far it looks like maybe not, but Lai and Hou are close, and the election is still more than a month away.

Taiwan opposition parties forming alliance

As the deadline for submitting candidacies approaches, the two main opposition parties in Taiwan have announced they will submit a joint candidate. They have yet to determine which party’s candidate will stand down in favor of the other– Hou Yu-ih of the Nationalist Party(KMT) and Ko Wen-je of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). They have a plan to use public opinion polls to settle the question, with each side selecting pollsters whose polling is to be considered. The election will be on 13 January 2024.

The presidency is elected by direct plurality, and up to now the incumbent Democratic Progressive Party’s candidate has been leading polls consistently, but recently with only around 40%. Hou and Ko have been roughly tied recently, in the mid-twenties, with polls varying as to which of the two is ahead of the other. If they could successfully combine their votes, the alliance should win. But alliances are rarely so seamless.

In addition, the KMT and TPP promise to form a coalition cabinet based on the parties’ relative success in the concurrent assembly election. Here is where things get really tricky. Will they make the decision according to seats won? This is the basis on which coalitions normally parcel out posts, after all. But Taiwan uses a disproportional system–specifically, a mixed-member majoritarian (MMM) system. It is unclear to me whether the parties are also forging an alliance for the assembly election. [See update below.] Under MMM, and with a joint presidential ticket, it would make sense to do so, given that this type of mixed-member system makes the single-seat district (plurality) contests more important to the overall seat balance. (They still could run separately on the list, given the two-vote system.)

In any case, the balance of forces in the legislative assembly will not necessarily reflect the balance of voter preferences, either due to vote-splitting (if the KMT and TPP compete against each other in single-seat districts) or “contamination” effects (whereby if one partner has the local candidate and the other does not, the one with the candidate may draw additional list votes). Votes for parties in the nominal and list component often have been fairly divergent in past Taiwanese elections under MMM. For instance, in the 2020 election, the DPP won 45.1% of the nominal (constituency) vote and 40.0% of the party-list vote. For the KMT the figures were 40.7% and 33.4%.

While pre-electoral coalitions are hardly unheard of in disproportional systems (see India under FPTP, plus for an MMM case, Japan), they may be more difficult when they involve a concurrent presidential election, given the importance of that indivisible office. They may also be more challenging to hold together when the allying parties’ strengths are quite balanced, as opposed to there being a clearly dominant partner (like the nationwide parties in the alliances in India or the LDP in Japan). I am referring to their balance in the presidential polling. It is not clear to me whether there is polling for assembly voting preferences. In the current assembly, the parties are very unbalanced. In 2020, the KMT won 38 seats and the TPP 5 (with DPP winning 61). In the nominal tier (single-seat districts), it was, not surprisingly, even more unbalanced: KMT 25, TPP 0 (DPP 48) [Corrected].

I should note–this being Fruits and Votes–that Taiwan uses a semi-presidential system. However, it is of the president-parliamentary subtype, the one in which the president retains constitutional authority to dismiss a premier and cabinet. Thus holding together pre-electoral coalitions after an election and throughout a term would tend to be more difficult than under a parliamentary (or premier-presidential) system.

The alliance seems quite fraught, especially as it is being struck so late. And, while he does not address the assembly elections, Nathan Batto of Academia Sinica is referenced in the Economist article saying that some of the TPP’s “Gen-Z” supporters may object to teaming up with the conservative KMT. Indeed, alliances are not necessarily as large as the sum of their parts. If the parties can hold each others’ support in the alliance, they should be able to defeat the DPP. But that is a big IF.

At Frozen Garlic, Batto has interesting detail on the question of how to use to polling to sort out the alliance presidential candidate, and states that Ko (TPP) got “rolled” in the process they agreed to.

Update: I asked Batto my question about the legislative elections, and he responded at his blog. The TPP is such a small party that it does not have many single-seat district nominees. The “overwhelming majority” of contests will be KMT vs. DPP, but there will be a few districts where the KMT and TPP both have candidates. So (my conclusion, not Batto’s) the TPP is a highly presidentialized party in that it potentially can win a significant share of the votes (per polling) for its presidential candidate, and perhaps also for its party list (especially if it runs its own candidate for the presidency to generate some coattails), but it has little presence as an organized party otherwise.

Later update: This plan did not go well.

Election indicators in Taiwan, SNTV era

I noticed that the always handy Election Indices file maintained by Michael Gallagher on his Electoral Systems page did not include Taiwan’s SNTV era of competitive elections (1992-2004). I needed the indicators for something I am working on. It just so happened that I had the candidate-level data for those years (thanks to Nathan Batto sharing them some years ago for another project). So I set out to calculate some key indices. In the off chance anyone needs them, here they are.

In the table below, “D2” is Gallagher’s “least squares” index of disproportionality (as a share, rather than percentage), “Nv” is the effective number of vote-earning parties, and “Ns” is the effective number of seat-winning parties.

year	D2	Nv	Ns
1992	0.0465	2.64	2.227
1995	0.04137	2.948	2.541
1998	0.0641	3.224	2.508
2001	0.04701	4.266	3.494
2004	0.03828	3.812	3.265

I calculated these by considering every independent candidate–and there are many of them, although not many won seats–as a separate “party.” This is the only really proper way to do these indices–especially for a purely nominal system like SNTV–if one has the data at candidate level, and in the absence of any information as to groups of these candidates being de-facto parties.

Values for Ns and Nv for these elections can be found in Bormann and Golder (as “enpp1” and “enep1”, respectively). However, my Nv values are somewhat higher because the index values in Bormann and Golder’s dataset would have been estimated from aggregated votes of “others” (including “independents”). That is, they do not take all others/independents to be one party (as is sometimes erroneously done by others), but without the candidate-level data, any such estimate could fall short of the method I am using, based on complete data on every candidate’s votes and formal party affiliation, if any. My calculations for Ns match theirs for enpp1 almost exactly, as they should, given that relatively few independents won seats (43 over the 5 elections).

Taiwan election, 2012: KMT re-elected, and unusual alliance behavior

In elections Saturday, the Taiwanese president, Ma Ying-jeou of the Kuomintang (KMT), was reelected with 51.8% of the vote. Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) came second with 45.6%, and James Soong of the People First Party won 2.8%.

The election is by plurality, so it was not especially close.

These were the first concurrent elections in Taiwan, the electoral cycle having been modified recently. As is to be expected with concurrent elections, the presidential and legislative votes were quite similar. The KMT-led alliance won 51.5% of the legislative votes, and will continue to control a majority of seats, with 67 of 113. (This is a decline from 85 at the previous, non-concurrent, election of 2008.)

These elections feature an unusual example of two parties competing in presidential elections but allied in concurrent legislative elections. Soong’s People First Party is part of the Pan Blue alliance, and whereas Sung himself managed only 2.8% of the vote, his party contributed 5.5% of the Pan Blue legislative vote.

Taiwan’s electoral system is mixed-member majoritarian (or parallel), with 79 district races decided by plurality, and 34 nationwide seats elected by proportional representation. People First won one single-seat contest, and 2 list seats. I assume the parties in alliance run common candidacies in the single-seat districts (and hence that the KMT stood down in the one contest won by the PFP, and the PFP did not contest many other districts), but that they run separate party lists. I hope someone can confirm that.

The only other case I know of where two parties competed in a presidential election but were allied in a concurrent legislative election would be Chile, 2005. At the time of the Chilean example of this sort of unusual alliance behavior, I remarked that the electoral rules of Chile made it advantageous for the parties to remain in their legislative alliance even after they chose to compete in the presidential race. In Chile, these rules are two-seat D’Hondt open lists. Taiwan’s MMM provides similar, if distinct, incentives to cooperate.

What is more surprising about the Taiwanese case is that by running separate presidential candidates, the alliance risked splitting the vote, given the use of plurality rule. In Chile, on the other hand, the presidency is elected through majority runoff. That Soong’s vote for president, where a split of the alliance vote was risky, was so much lower than his party’s legislative votes can be scored as a victory for Duverger.

Fruits and votes in Taiwan

Here at F&V we rather like the idea of fruits figuring in a campaign.

Nathan Batto has all the juicy details at his Taiwan politics blog, Frozen Garlic.

Taiwan to adopt concurrent elections

By decision of the electoral commission, Taiwan will move to concurrent elections for president and legislature. Robert Elgie has some details, and concludes by noting:

The other semi-presidential democracies with scheduled concurrent elections are Mozambique, Namibia and Peru. The last concurrent elections in Romania were in 2004.

Taiwan’s move makes sense, as did Romania’s–in the other direction–before it.

With the Taiwanese move, the remaining cases of concurrent elections are of the president-parliamentary subtype of semi-presidential democracy. Romania, on the other hand, is premier-presidential. ((Definitions: A semi-presidential system has a popularly elected president alongside a premier (prime minister) who is responsible to the legislative majority. Under premier-presidentialism, that responsibility is exclusive: the president is not granted constitutional authority to dismiss a premier or cabinet. Under the president-parliamentary subtype, the president has constitutional authority to dismiss a premier, who thus (along with the rest of the cabinet) must maintain the confidence of both the elected president and the majority of the legislature.))

I would argue that the more the formal rules of a semi-presidential system lean towards presidentialism, as in Taiwan, the less it makes sense to have nonconcurrent elections, which increase the odds of an opposition-dominated legislature. For premier-presidentialism, on the other hand, it is logical to increase the (potential for) independence of the premier by making legislative elections separate temporally from presidential.

It appears that constitutional reformers agree–at least those who have recently reformed the electoral cycles in Romania and Taiwan!