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ABSTRACT
In order to understand why women tend to be under-nominated even though they are more likely to be elected compared to men in Taiwan, this study focuses on the nomination systems of two major political parties. The country provides a critical case of inter-party and intra-party comparison for women’s nomination, as the two major parties diverge in their practice of candidate selection. Further, the electoral reforms from the SNTV (Single Non-Transferable Vote) system to the SMD (Single-Member District) system have led parties to alter their strategies in selecting women candidates. With the nomination dataset compiled over the past 20 years, this study finds that more centralized nomination is more conducive to women’s candidacy, even under different electoral systems. Under the old SNTV system, the more centralized KMT (Kuomintang) nominated more women candidates than did the decentralized DPP (Democratic Progressive Party). Under the new SMD system, women’s representation as a whole actually increased in Taiwan, which runs contrary to the general expectation, compared to the multimember-district system and so the SMD tends to inhibit women’s representation. The growing centralization in the major parties after the electoral rule changed to the new system, has enhanced women’s candidacies, but the higher male incumbent advantage is a hurdle still to be overcome in the long term. This study argues that although electoral rules have altered the parameters of party competition, party nomination are critical factors for explaining changing women’s representation.
ABSTRACT IN TRADTIONAL CHINESE
為何在台灣即使女性當選機率高於男性，但是女性被政黨提名的機率卻相對較低？回答這個問題，本研究關注在兩大主要政黨的提名制度。台灣的主要政黨在提名方法上存在很多差異與變化，可作為黨際與黨內比較的關鍵個案。此外，選舉制度從過去的複數選區單記不可讓渡投票制轉變為現行的單一選區多數決制，也影響了政黨在選擇女性候選人的策略考量。本研究搜集了過去二十年間主要政黨的提名資料庫，從中發現不論在何種選制下，政黨提名方式越是中央集權的政黨，對於女性候選越是有利。在舊制的複數選區多數決制下，提名方式相對較為中央集權的國民黨，相對於提名較為分權民主的民進黨，提名較多的女性候選人。而在現行的單一選區多數決下，女性代表比例顯著地提升，這和多數文獻主張單一選區多數決制不利於女性參選的預期相反。在單一選區多數決制下，兩黨提名方式趨同，皆朝向中央集權化，而這樣的提名方式有助於女性被提名。新選制之下的現任者優勢是女性參政長期要克服的障礙。整體而言，本研究主張，選制或有改變政黨競爭，然而政黨提名才是解釋女性代表的關鍵因素。
Notes on contributors
Wan-Ying YANG is Professor of the Department of Political Science at National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan. From 2013 to 2017 (Feb), she served as the chair of the department of Political Science, and then the deputy dean of the College of Social Sciences at National Chengchi University. Currently, she is a board member of the Taiwan Political Science Association and serves on the editorial boards of many Taiwan’s indexed journals. Her research interests focus on subjects of identity and gender politics, women’s movements, women’s political participation, and gender gaps in political attitudes and behaviors. She is the author of many articles on gender and identity politics published in Taiwan and international journals, including most recently, Asian Women, Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, Issues & Studies, Taiwanese Journal of Political Science, Taiwan Democracy Quarterly, Journal of Social Sciences and Philosophy, and the Journal of Electoral Studies. She has been a visiting professor at University of Göttingen, University of University of Tübingen, Germany. Email: [email protected]
Joyce GELB is Professor Emerita of Political Science and women’s studies at City College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She published Gender Policies in Japan and the United States: Comparing Women’s Movements, Rights and Politics (Palgrave, 2003) and Women and Politics Around the World, co- edited with Marian Palley (ABC-CLIO, 2009). Her article on “Women’s Leadership In Japan and Taiwan” appeared in O’Connor ed. Gender and Women’s Leadership (Sage, 2010). “Gender Equity in Japan” in James D Babb, ed. Sage Handbook of Modern Japanese Studies and “Gender Policy and Leadership” in Mino Vianello and Mary Hawkesworth eds., Gender and Power :Toward Equality and Democratic Governance (Palgrave Macmillan), both in 2015. She has been a visiting professor at Yale, Doshisha, Tokyo, and National Chengchi University among others and has lectured widely at conferences and universities from Lviv, Ukraine to Durban South Africa. Her most recent article, with Naoko Kumagai, “Gender Equality in Japan: Internal Policy Processes and Impact and Foreign Implications Under Prime Minister Abe’s Womenomics” was published in an edited volume by Mary McCarthy, Handbook on Foreign Policy, Routledge January 2018. Email: [email protected]
Notes
1. Mixed Member Majoritarian (MMM) rules are a combination of the Single Member District (SMD) system, paralleled by Proportional Representation (PR). SMD is the system where a single member gets elected in the district, where among multiple candidates the competition primarily centers around two most viable candidates grappling for a single seat. This is , unlike the multiple district system, where many candidates ran in the same district, competing for multiple seats.
2. The Legislative Yuan elected in mainland China in 1947 in the first term remained in office until 1991 under the authoritarian Chinese-nationalist KMT regime. With only a small percentage of additional seats its candidates were elected in Taiwan since 1969, the first-term Legislative Yuan used to be called “the Non-reelected Congress.” Therefore, we focus our analysis on the period starting in 1992 (the second term) after democratization until the most recent 2016 (the ninth term) election.
3. Under the old electoral system, the PR seats could be viewed as a by-product of the SNTV. Voters did not vote directly for the at-large PR lists. Instead, the PR seats were allocated to all the parties, in proportion with their aggregated votes, as obtained in all SNTV districts.
4. In 1996, the DPP passed its one-fourth party gender quota as its nomination regulation. The KMT followed suit only after it was defeated in the 2000 election, when it also adopted a one-fourth gender quota in the party nominations (Huang, Citation2001, Citation2015).
5. Personal vote refers to the electoral support a candidate received, mainly based on his or her personal reputation rather than that of the party. Carey and Shugart (Citation1995, p. 429) argued that the SNTV-multimember system, which forced competition among members of the same party, leads to very serious coordination problems for parties and ranked this system as the most personalistic among all electoral systems.
6. Though the party leaders could interpret party cadres’ evaluations in any way they desired, as these were often applied along with the opinion polls or party member primaries, they are still classified as the democratic method.
7. Before the 1990s, in 1989, the KMT first experimented with closed party primaries to select candidates for the legislative and local executive elections, in an attempt to weaken the clout of factions (Baum & Robinson, Citation1999; Wu & Fell, Citation2001). However, this was mainly an advisory exercise and it was left to the party’s central leadership to decide on whether or not to adopt the results of the primaries.
8. The so-called pocket members were those recruited by candidates by paying party membership fees for them in exchange for their votes in the primaries. The strategy has been effective as the DPP lacked registered party members. Such manipulations by factions were undertaken to support candidates to win the primaries by mobilizing party members.
9. Both party primaries and opinion surveys are democratic methods used to settle internal party disputes in the nomination process, with the former working with party member ballots, and the latter through telephone surveys conducted by parties that asked randomly sampled voters to rank their candidate preferences. To avoid vote-buying in party primaries and increase the overall competiveness in the general elections, gradually parties preferred sampling surveys conducted among all party members who were the voters in party primaries.
10. The only different adjustment came in the DPP, which in 2006 introduced the so-called “remove Blues survey” (pailanmindiao), which excluded those who previously supported the Blue parties (KMT and its allies) from the party survey to avoid possible manipulation by KMT supporters in the DPP nomination process. Originally, party surveys were supposed to be open to all voters; this type of exclusive survey worked in ways similar to closed primaries and was disfavored by the more moderate politicians and factions in the primaries. As it partly accounted for the electoral defeat, the “remove Blues survey” was no longer used in the DPP’s primary processes after 2008 (Fell, Citation2013, pp. 165–66).
11. During the 1992–1995 legislative elections, the reserved seats were allocated in a lump-sum manner, and calculated at the provincial level, which made it hard to detect their effects in each district. In 1998, the legislature was expanded from 164 to 225 seats, and the reserved seats were calculated at the city and county levels. So, parties had to nominate multiple women candidates in larger districts and allocated their votes to maximize their seats. Therefore, we only examined the gender quota data during the 1998–2004 legislative elections in which the effect of the reserved seats could be detected at the district level.
12. In the cases of democratic selection, a mix of primaries and polls has often been used in the larger districts to settle the intense competition among numerous candidates, while larger districts are often those with party gender quotas and reserved seats. As for the reserved seats in a city or county with a district magnitude ranging between five and 19, one female seat was granted; and in a city or county with a district magnitude larger than 20 seats, two female seats were granted. Simultaneously, the one-fourth party gender quotas were implemented so that whenever a party nominated four candidates a female candidate was guaranteed.
13. The 2008 elections could be considered as a transitional one with the downsizing of the total seats to half, so that for the first time both parties had to handle an over-crowded field in their nomination process.