Frozen Garlic has hit a major milestone. I started writing this blog 12 years ago. Elections in Taiwan is a very niche topic, so I never expected a wide readership. Further, it’s written in English, and most of the people who are most interested in this topic prefer to read about it in Chinese. And the nature of the electoral cycle means that I go several months at a time without writing anything. When you don’t post any content, readers stop reading. When I started, I thought I was writing as much for personal expression as for the benefit of any readers.
Today, WordPress informs me that the blog has achieved 500,000 page views. In our modern world, we are used to seeing extremely large numbers, so half a million might not seem like a lot. However, I have done a lot of data entry over the years. In the old days when we had paper surveys, it only took a few minutes to enter the data for one survey. However, when you need to do that a thousand times, it starts adding up. That was a job for a team of RAs, and it took several days to plow through the pile. My database of candidates in Taiwanese elections is currently at about 69,000 candidates, and I have put a great deal of time and energy into that over the last decade. I think 500,000 is an enormous number.
I’d like to thank everyone who has spent several minutes plowing through one of my long, poorly edited screeds over the years. I hope it has been as informative and interesting for you as it has been fulfilling for me.
I’m going to start planning a small party for February 2034 when I should hit 1,000,000 page views.
Recently a foreign scholar asked me about the importance of gender in Taiwanese elections, and I gave the standard answer. Women are more likely to vote for the KMT than the DPP. This always surprises people unfamiliar with Taiwan. Do you mean that when a woman was one of the two main presidential candidates, more female voters supported the man?? Wait, I thought the DPP was a bit more progressive than the KMT. Are you saying that female voters preferred the more conservative party?? Well, yes.
However, I wondered whether that might be changing. More specifically, I wondered whether younger voters followed the same patterns as older voters. So I spent far too much time rummaging around in old survey data, and I came up with some interesting answers. The gender gap in 2020 was not like the previous three elections. And younger voters are, in fact, different.
In voting, the gender gap can be defined as the difference between support for two parties among men minus the difference among women [(Am-Bm)-(Af-Bf)]. This gives you a magnitude and a direction, so that we can say something like “women support Democrats 14 points more than Republicans, compared to men.”
I looked at the Taiwan Elections and Democratization Study (TEDS) post-election face-to-face surveys for each of the past five presidential elections. As you can see, there was a mild gap in 2004 in favor of the DPP. However, in 2008 and 2012 there were very big gaps in favor of the KMT. 2012 is the one that everyone paid attention to since Tsai Ing-wen was the first female presidential candidate representing a major party. However, this did not attract much support from women in the general electorate. The gender gap was much smaller in 2016, though it was still mildly in the KMT’s favor. In 2020, however, the gap had shifted in the other direction. In her third run, Tsai finally achieved a gender gap in her favor. It isn’t a huge gender gap, but it is markedly different from the previous three elections.
That’s the headline, but there is always more to dig up. After reflection, I decided to ignore 2004 in the rest of this post. There wasn’t much of a gender gap in 2004, and the jumbled data seemed to cause more confusion than clarity. At any rate, the patterns we have been talking about for the past decade emerge clearly with Ma Ying-jeou in 2008.
My suspicion is that younger voters are different from older voters. How should I define younger and older? Normally, we just break samples into ages 20-29, 30-29, and so on. That’s fine for a single survey. However, I’m looking at four-year intervals over a couple of decades. Nearly half of each group graduates to the next age group in each subsequent survey. Instead, I need to look age political generations, so that I’m looking at the same group of voters in each survey. There is a fairly large literature on political generations, and each scholar cuts the population slightly differently. Ideally, you would like each generation to go through the same critical formative experiences. I don’t want to get into those battles since I don’t have strong feelings about exactly where the lines between generations should be drawn. I’m simply going to borrow a definition from scholars who have thought extensively about this question. Lin Pei-ting, Cheng Su-feng, and T.Y. Wang recently published a paper on political generations and national identity, and since they are all knowledgeable and trustworthy scholars, I’ll just steal their definition.
cohort
Birth
Ages 2008
Size 2008
Ages 2020
Size 2020
5
1985-
23&under
7.2
35&under
26.7
4
1969-84
24-39
35.5
36-51
31.1
3
1954-68
40-54
31.1
52-66
25.7
2
1942-53
55-66
14.7
64-78
12.0
1
-1941
67&up
11.4
79&up
4.5
Cohort1, the oldest cohort, has been slowly aging out of the electorate. In 2008, there were still many C1 members who were active and energetic. Now, however, they are almost all octogenarians or older, and their share of the electorate[1] has declined to less than 5%. At the other end of the spectrum, C5 were all still too young to vote in 2004, so they have slowly been aging into the electorate, making up a larger share in each election cycle. The middle three cohorts are largely the same people in each election. We probably won’t be able to say that much longer, since the oldest people in C2 are now nearing their 80th birthdays. C3 and C4 represent Taiwan’s era of rapid population growth, and these are the largest two cohorts for most of the era we are looking at. In 2008, they accounted for roughly 2/3 of the electorate, and in 2020, they still made up 57%.
Rather than putting up one chaotic chart with too many jumbled lines to see a clear pattern, I’ll tell this story cohort by cohort. I start with the chart of all voters. Blue lines represent support for KMT and PFP presidential candidates, while green lines represent the DPP. Darker blue and green represent men and lighter blue and green represent women. You can see the national gender gaps quite clearly in this picture. In 2008, there is a huge gap between the light blue and light green lines, reflecting a 25% difference in support for Ma and Hsieh. The gap is about half that size among men. Hence, we get a double-digit gender gap in favor of the KMT in 2008. In 2012 and 2016, the two green lines are very close; there wasn’t much difference in support for the DPP among women and men. However, there is still a sizeable gap between the two blue lines; women gave significantly more support to the KMT than men did.[2] That gap disappeared in 2020, and a gap emerged between the two green lines.[3]
C1, the oldest cohort, doesn’t show much of a gender gap in 2008 and 2012. The lines go in all crazy directions in 2016 and 2020, but we probably should ignore that. As a general rule of thumb, you shouldn’t pay attention to subgroups with fewer than 200 cases. In 2016 and 2020, C1 had shrunk so much that it was under 100 cases in the TEDS surveys. This isn’t the group creating the gender gap.
C2 does show a consistent pattern. For the blue side, there isn’t much difference between men and women. However, on the green side, women consistently give less support to the DPP than men.
C3 also shows a consistent pattern, though it is different from the C2 pattern. From one angle, it is the mirror image. In the first three elections, there wasn’t much difference on the green side, but women were consistently more supportive of the KMT than men. However, while C2 showed the same pattern all the way through 2020, C3 did not. In 2020, C3 suddenly reversed its previous pattern, with women swinging dramatically toward the DPP and away from the KMT.
C4 is very similar to C3. In the first three elections, there is a strong pro-KMT gender gap. However, in 2020 this suddenly reverses. Recall that C3 and C4 make up most of the electorate. When these two groups show the same pattern, it’s a good bet that the national pattern will also look like that.
C5, the youngest cohort, is very different. If we ignore 2008 because the cohort was still small, C5 has had a consistent pro-DPP gender gap. Even while the older cohorts were producing pro-KMT gender gaps in 2012 and 2016, C5 was showing the opposite pattern. C5 is also the only cohort that reported a big increase in support for the DPP in 2020 over 2016. Men increased their support for Tsai by 18%. One might expect that it would be nearly impossible for women, who were starting from a higher base, to match this, but women also increased their support for Tsai by 15%. I have written about the phenomenal levels of youth turnout in 2020, and you can see it here. Typically, about a quarter of the sample does not report a vote, and this number is typically higher among young voters. Non-response rates among young men commonly reach 40%. However, in 2020 it was only 22% among men in C5, and only 14% among women. In 2020, C5 turned out at extremely high rates, they overwhelmingly supported Tsai, and, as is their established pattern, women exceeded men’s already sky-high support.
A pro-DPP gender gap is a new experience for C3 and C4, and we don’t know if it will last. I am much more confident about the pro-DPP gender gap in C5. At any rate, I will no longer confidently tell foreign scholars about the pro-KMT gender gap. 2020 put an end to that.
[1] OK, actually this is their share of the TEDS sample. However, TEDS is weighted by age groups, so it might not be that far off the general electorate.
[2] The numbers don’t add up to 100% because some respondents didn’t vote or did not tell us who they voted for.
[3] Post-election surveys often find too much support for winners, and these are no exception. The KMT lines are too high in 2008 and 2012, and the DPP lines are too high in 2016 and 2020. Likewise, the estimates for the losers are too low. This seems to be especially true for 2012 and 2020, which were both years in which an incumbent won re-election. However, I am not aware of any research suggesting this phenomenon is related to age or gender.
In her National Day address in 2019, President Tsai laid out her vision of the what this society is. To put it briefly, she defined the country as ROC Taiwan, a society that has been defined by common experiences for seven decades. The KMT has campaigned for years on the ROC, but Tsai essentially told the KMT that they no longer had sole ownership of that concept. The DPP was also going to claim the ROC, which she explained was equivalent to Taiwan. This country, ROC Taiwan, belongs to everyone, and she hoped everyone would work together for its prosperity and sovereignty.
Somehow, I have never found time to write about the ROC Taiwan discourse. I believe it is one of the most important developments in Taiwan politics in recent years. Tsai basically stole the KMT’s heritage and symbols, and the KMT hasn’t figured out how to react. One of my friends told me (with disbelief in his voice) that his polls showed that people trusted Tsai Ing-wen to protect the ROC more than they trusted Han Kuo-yu. The DPP has become the party of stability, while the KMT has become the party with radical and dangerous ideas.
If you haven’t read the 2019 address or the 2021 address in which she restated the ROC Taiwan discourse, it’s worth it to read them carefully and think about what a monumental shift this is in the DPP’s traditional positions. DPP true believers don’t like the ROC name or symbols. However, Tsai has convinced them that it’s more important to fight the substantive battle over solidarity, sovereignty, and security than the symbolic one over the name ROC and the flag. It’s hard to give up cherished positions, but sometimes that is what is necessary to move forward.
Why am I talking about this today? Well, the Tsai government is making an even more audacious move against KMT symbols. It isn’t enough to steal the ROC and the flag, now they want to coopt the legacy of Chiang Ching-kuo as well!
The Veterans Affairs Commission is holding a big event this weekend in memory of the 34th anniversary of CCK’s death. If there is one thing most military veterans, especially the older ones, can agree on, it is that CCK was a great man. However, it’s a bit surprising for a DPP administration to try to bask in his legacy. After all, he was the dictator that the democracy movement of the 1970s and 1980s struggled against. Yet this is exactly what they are doing. And by using the VAC to send their message, they are going right into the heart of what has always been enemy territory. This is a bit like Kennedy going to Houston to speak to Southern Baptist ministers about his Catholicism.
Yesterday Deputy VAC chair Lee Wen-chung 李文忠 gave an interview on a radio show hosted by Huang Ching-lung 黃清龍, former editor-in-chief of the Want Daily 旺報, to talk about CCK. Keep in mind that Lee is very much a DPP political appointee. He is a former legislator (from the New Tide faction), and he ran for office under the DPP banner as recently as 2014 and 2016. He is a member of Team Tsai, not merely a technocrat. His comments about CCK are part of the broader ROC Taiwan discourse.
Lee said that, like every political figure, CCK[1] had good and bad points, and that we should be fair to him and acknowledge his contributions. He discussed several. First, CCK did away with the dream of reconquering the mainland through military force. At most, he talked about unification under the Three People’s Principles. Second, Taiwan faced several economic crises in the 1970s, and many people unsure about Taiwan’s future emigrated to other countries. CCK stabilized the country with the Ten Major Construction Projects. Third, he realized that the government needed to bring in native Taiwanese talent. As an example, he paid close attention to Lee Teng-hui’s career and routinely held conversations with LTH when he was Taipei mayor. He even said, “I am Taiwanese.” Fourth, he was a liberalizer. When DPP was founded, no one was arrested. Democracy is not his credit, but not using suppression was a very big contribution. Fifth, he supported innovation. He was willing to confront problems such as lifting restrictions on media and political parties and opening up elections, and he used his authority to convince others to accept these changes. After CCK passed away, LTH became famous for the silent revolution. In fact, he was building on the foundation laid by CCK.
Lee defined the CCK path in six characters: 反共、革新、保台 (resist communism, promote innovation, protect Taiwan). He then spoke directly to “friends in the KMT” and delivered the hammer blow: you have discarded the CCK path. Resist communism? The KMT is not merely friendly to communism, it is kissing up to communism.
What Lee did not explicitly say is that the DPP is now the repository of those values. If you are a follower of the CCK path, the place to find politicians who believe in resisting communism, embracing innovation, and protecting Taiwan is now in the DPP. He didn’t say that, but it wasn’t difficult to make the leap in your mind.
I learned about the VAC event and this interview because Tsai Shih-ping 蔡詩萍, a blue-leaning media figure, made that leap in his head and wrote a pained message about it on Facebook. Tsai put all these ideas together, including the idea that the DPP was about to coopt CCK. Several media outlets then reported on this Facebook post.
Tsai argues the DPP is using an old KMT trick of cloaking itself in a great historical tradition. The KMT had traditionally placed itself in a grand Chinese narrative, starting with Yao and Shun, going through Confucius and Mencius, and ending up with Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek. Now the DPP is constructing a historical narrative of Taiwan’s democratization starting with CCK, continuing through LTH, and presently embodied by President Tsai. Critically, there is no place for the modern KMT in this, since they adamantly reject everything to do with LTH and the DPP. All they can do these days is to criticize Taiwan’s democracy. Since most people are proud of Taiwan’s democracy, the KMT is placed outside Taiwan’s mainstream.
Tsai reiterates Lee’s point about resisting communism, pointing out that when the CCP talked about creating a “new form of democracy,” no KMT figures jumped out to respond, “Sorry, that’s not democracy.”
Tsai ends his post by exhorting the KMT to return to the true path of CCK: resist communism, promote democracy, protect Taiwan.
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Ok, so I don’t think the DPP is going to successfully steal the legacy of CCK. I don’t expect DPP candidates to start running under the slogan, “Support CCK, Vote DPP.” But that’s not really the point. They are trying to win the large group of voters in the middle of the electorate who learned as schoolchildren that their country was the ROC, sang the national anthem, saluted the flag, and supported the national team 中華隊 athletes in international competitions. There are a lot of people who absorbed the symbols of the state without necessarily absorbing the Chinese identity or ideology behind them. CCK was president during a time that many people remember fondly because of the economic miracle, so it is natural to think that he must have been a good president. The DPP has argued for a few decades that he was actually an evil dictator who made the people miserable, but they haven’t gotten too far with that. These days, CCK is the KMT’s last trump card. So the DPP is now arguing that CCK had some real contributions, but the modern KMT has walked away from all the values that led to those contributions. The next time Han Kuo-yu, Ma Ying-jeou, or Eric Chu go onstage and weep about their love for CCK, the DPP hopes that some voters will wonder why they aren’t actually following him these days. Moreover, they want to redefine CCK’s beneficial values as what are now consensus (read: our) values. Ideally, the DPP wants CCK (like the ROC) to belong to all of Taiwan, not just the KMT.
[1] Lee referred to CCK several times as 經國先生 (Mr. Ching-kuo). This is a very polite way to speak of him, implying respect and even reverence. DPP politicians do not habitually call him this.
The Election Study Center at National Chengchi University has released an updated version of our big three political indicators today. Let me save you some time: there isn’t much dramatic change. The 2020 numbers for the green side were inflated a bit by the successful response to the pandemic, and now they have regressed a bit toward the mean and were dragged down by the lower numbers in the summer during the outbreak. Anyway, I’m not going to talk about the 2021 data points at all in this post.
The ESC has been tracking three indicators since the early 1990s: Party ID, Taiwanese/Chinese (T/C) identity, and preferences on unification or independence (UI). Every delegation of election observers, diplomats, media workers, or academics who has been to a briefing at the ESC has seen these, and these days they are widely cited in the popular media every time we update them.
There has been some discussion about the usefulness of polling data on preferences for Taiwan’s future status, with some people arguing it is fatally misleading. I believe the UI question continues to be useful.
Let me be clear about my biases. I hold a joint appointment at the ESC and have been associated with it in one role or another since 1995. I’m not a neutral observer; this is my family.
Here are the updated versions.
Of these three, I think UI is the least important. If you want to know what is happening today or tomorrow, look at party ID. If you want to understand the longer-term trends, look at the T/C identity. The party system and all national politics are ultimately grounded in identity. T/C identity is a simple question that asks respondents who they think they are. Respondents don’t need to worry about what anyone else is saying or doing, they just need to think about what they feel. Of course, what it means to be Chinese or Taiwanese is a shifting target in a world in which the PRC looms ever larger and demands the right to define terms for everyone. Nevertheless, this is a relatively easy and readily understandable question for most respondents.
In contrast, UI is a more complex question. It requires people to think about a lot of different questions, many of which are about unknowable things in the future. What does unification/independence mean? What would that world look like? What kind of life would I have in it? Is it realistic? Is it inevitable? What is the military capacity of the USA, PRC, ROC, and all the other countries that might be relevant? How willing are those countries to use their capacity?
In general, I’m not a big fan of questions that require people to imagine the future. Imagine, for example, that back in 2018 a prescient pollster had asked people, “If there were a global pandemic and scientists developed a vaccine, would you be willing to take it?” Would those results provide an accurate picture of what unfolded in 2021? Could our 2018 respondents even fathom what the pandemic would look like, much less the way various pundits would react to it? There are a bunch of people right now trying to ask whether Taiwanese citizens would fight back if the PRC invaded. Well, it depends. On what? Well, everything. The UI question isn’t quite this extreme, but the complex considerations make it less informative than party ID or T/C identity.
Nonetheless, the UI question remains useful for understanding how Taiwanese people understand the world today and their aspirations for the future. It doesn’t provide definitive answers, but it does provide some insights.
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First, let me establish that the status quo respondents are different in important ways from respondents who tell you they want independence or unification. Pundits on both sides are eager to claim that the SQ respondents really agree with their position. As pollsters, we are responsible for asking – not telling – respondents what they think. And it turns out that you can’t just put the SQ respondents on one side or the other. They are different from both. Here are some simple crosstabs from the 2020 TEDS post-election survey.
Ok, so respondents in the different groups think and behave differently. That isn’t the same as their UI preferences. TEDS probes a bit more deeply into the conditionality of UI attitudes, asking them to agree or disagree in four different scenarios, which I will label easy and hard independence and unification.[2]
Easy independence: If Taiwan could still maintain peaceful relations with the PRC after declaring independence, then Taiwan should establish a new, independent country.
Hard independence: Even if the PRC decides to attack Taiwan after Taiwan declares independence, Taiwan should still become a new country.
Easy unification: If the economic, social, and political conditions were about the same in both mainland China and Taiwan, then the two sides should unify.
Hard unification: Even if the gap between the economic, social, and political conditions in mainland China and Taiwan is quite large, the two sides should still unify.
(I have combined immediate and eventual unification (independence) into one category.)
Easy
independence
Hard
independence
Agree
disagree
agree
Disagree
Unification
42.6
50.7
20.4
74.1
SQ now, decide later
59.5
34.7
34.1
57.3
SQ forever
47.4
37.1
28.4
53.7
Independence
82.5
15.2
67.9
27.5
All
64.6
28.8
45.2
46.1
Easy
unification
Hard
unification
agree
disagree
Agree
Disagree
Unification
71.6
20.3
40.5
50.0
SQ now, decide later
34.7
58.5
10.4
82.0
SQ forever
19.3
62.9
8.3
73.1
Independence
13.0
84.3
3.7
93.1
All
26.0
66.3
10.0
81.7
I have no idea what to make of the 20.3% who say they want unification in our standard question, but they disagree with unification in the easy unification scenario. I don’t really understand the 20.4% who agree with hard independence either, though at least you can imagine some of them thinking a Chinese invasion would be the fastest way to bring about unification. Similarly, I don’t have an explanation for why 15.2% of people who want independence in the base question disagree with easy independence. These results are good reminders that every respondent has their own ideas, and they don’t always match up with the categories or logic that we think are reasonable. Every respondent is a unique soap opera.
The rest of the respondents make more sense (to me). Many readers will wonder about the SQ respondents, and these responses make it clear that they are not actually neutral between unification and independence. Clear pluralities are willing to have easy independence, but strong majorities are not willing to accept unification even in the easiest scenario.
The SQ forever respondents are particularly interesting. Just under half of them are willing to accept easy independence. The DPP insists that SQ forever is effectively independence, so we should just lump them together with the other independence supporters. This says otherwise. A good number of them seem to mean it when they say they want to maintain the SQ forever rather than seeking formal independence. You might argue that this is splitting hairs since the only difference is a formal declaration of independence, but that’s not nothing. Many of those people in the independence category actually want – some of them demand – a formal declaration. They had the opportunity to chose SQ forever and found it not good enough for them. They want independence, dammit! These two groups are not equivalent.
Why don’t we ask these four conditional questions in every survey? Why don’t we report these results to the media as breathlessly as the standard UI question? For one thing, it takes a lot of time to ask four questions, and we don’t ask them in every survey. More importantly, these are hypothetical conditions, and people differ quite a bit on how realistic or satisfactory these scenarios are. It’s hard to say that any of these questions provides a more definitive answer to what people want than the standard question in which we let them imagine the future for themselves.
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Let me reiterate that, while the SQ respondents are qualitatively different from the independence respondents, they are NOT halfway between unification and independence. A very large number of them are openly hostile to the idea of unification. A decade ago, my colleagues (and fellow members of the ESC family) Hsiao Yi-ching 蕭怡靖 and Yu Ching-hsin 游清鑫 published a fantastic paper using data from 2009 in which they followed up on all those SQ answers. They first asked respondents what their second choice was, and if the respondents chose the other SQ option or refused to answer, they then asked which option the respondent could least accept. This produced a new six-category classification. What starts out as a two-to-one preference for independence (with only 30% expressing an opinion) ends up as a … two-to-one preference for independence (with 60% expressing an opinion) and a two-to-one preference against unification (with 90% expressing an opinion).
Base UI question
Hsiao and Yu Revised UI battery
Immediate unification
0.8
Immediate unification
0.8
Eventual unification
10.9
Eventual unification
18.7
SQ now, decide later
32.3
SQ, oppose independence
9.6
SQ forever
24.6
SQ, oppose unification
19.9
Eventual independence
17.5
Eventual independence
30.1
Immediate independence
3.9
Immediate independence
10.0
Non-response
3.9
Non-response
10.9
n
1130
N
1130
If you want to know more about what people think when they talk about unification or independence, there is no easy answer. They think about all sorts of different things. My colleague Cheng Su-feng 鄭夙芬 (who was the first person I met at the ESC and has been there since before we started asking any of these questions) has done a lot of focus groups over the past twenty years listening to people. She can tell you lots of stories about what people think they want. Unfortunately, the nature of this sort of qualitative research means that it is nearly impossible to summarize in one table or chart. It’s complicated; there is a person contradicting every clean narrative.
——————————————-
We are scholars, not pundits, and our primary reason for producing these data is to understand what has just happened rather than to try to predict the future or win a partisan argument. UI continues to be very useful for understanding a lot of things that we care about. As an example, let me present two very basic voting models in which I want to know who voted for the DPP candidate. The first is from the 1994 governor election, the first single-seat national election in Taiwan’s history. The second is from the just concluded 2020 presidential election. I’m just looking at T/C identity, UI preference, party ID, and ethnicity. I’m ignoring all the other standard variables (age, education, occupation, etc) because I’m lazy and this is a blog post, not a research paper. Still, look at the continuity over the past 26 years.
(A quick stats lesson: A positive coefficient (b) means respondents in that category were more likely to vote for the DPP candidate, and a negative coefficient means they were less likely. A zero coefficient means the variable doesn’t matter. If a coefficient is large relative to the standard error, it will be statistically significant. So powerful coefficients will be positive and significant (like Taiwanese identity) or negative and significant (like KMT party ID). These independent variables constructed from categorical variables and are compared to the missing reference category. So a person with a Taiwanese identity is significantly more likely to vote for the DPP candidate than a person with both Taiwanese and Chinese identities.)
The first conference I went to in Taiwan was in early 1995 when scholars were still figuring out how all these variables related to each other. I remember one professor (can’t remember who) saying that party ID, T/C identity, and UI preference were all “three sides of the same coin.” That is pithy and brilliant, though it overstates the correlation a bit. The three are all a bit different, so they all add a bit to the models. If, for example, I took out the party ID variables, the others would suddenly become much more powerful. The fact that they still matter even with party ID in the models illustrates their impact. The point here is that they do all matter. In fact, they arguably matter even more today than they did back when the modern party system was much younger. Since this post is about UI, let me point out that a respondent preferring either immediate or eventual independence votes differently than one who prefers one of the two SQ categories (SQ is the reference category in this model). Again, people who tell you they prefer the SQ cannot simply be lumped together with people who prefer independence or people who prefer unification. UI continues to be an important tool for understanding why things are happening the way they are.
——————————–
Questions like this that we ask again and again, year after year are extremely valuable for trying to figure out the impact of various events, telling convincing stories about what is happening, and simply identifying important trends. In recent years, the UI responses have been fairly stable and at the same time quite volatile. If we look at the results from the TEDS quarterly polls on presidential satisfaction since Tsai’s election, you can see a few peaks and valleys. For the first two years, it was pretty stable. 25% supported independence, 10% supported unification, and 60% supported the status quo. There was a sudden increase for unification in 2017, and in the three surveys from March to September 2018, unification was around 16% while independence was near 20%. Suddenly, the two were almost equal. Then 2019 reversed that trend and went even further in the opposite direction. By the early months of the pandemic, unification was down at 5% while independence soared to the high 30s. Since then, the numbers have regressed toward that original baseline, though they haven’t gone all the way back. Who changed?
I don’t have the time or energy to do a full breakdown of these shifts, so I’m just going to look briefly how at different age groups changed in four different surveys. I use June 2016 as a baseline; September 2018 was the peak of the unification wave; March 2020 saw the peak of the independence wave; and September 2021 is the most recent survey that we have data for.
It is fairly well-known that younger people have stronger support for independence. In fact, there is a fairly sharp dividing line at around 40 years old. People under 40 look pretty similar and people over 40 look fairly similar, but those two groups are notably different from each other. This is even clearer in T/C identity, but you can see it in UI as well.
One clear age divide involves support for the status quo. Younger people are not nearly as interested in SQ as old people, and this is especially true for SQ forever. Perhaps “forever” means something different to people who are 25 and 75. However, young people are also not that interested in deciding later, even though they have plenty of time left to make that decision.
What happened with that that spike for unification in Sept 2018? It occurs in all age groups, though it is a bit smaller in the 20-29 group. It wasn’t just gullible old people or naïve youngsters; all ages were susceptible to whatever suddenly made China look more appealing. Where did all those new unification supporters come from? The over 50 groups saw huge drops in support for SQ forever. The under 40s actually saw slight increases for the two SQ categories, but they saw huge drops in support for independence. Now, young people are generally less entrenched in their beliefs and more open to new ideas, but I don’t think all those youths went straight from independence all the way across the political spectrum to unification. I think it is more likely that many young independence supporters shifted to SQ, while many SQ supporters shifted to unification. At any rate, there were different patterns among young and old respondents.
What about the surge for independence in March 2020? It was much larger among younger voters. However, those big gains for the younger voters have mostly faded. Support for independence for people in their 20s and 30s is not that much different in September 2021 from its level in the June 2016 baseline survey. March 2020 was a temporary surge for them. It looks as if they tried out some new ideas but eventually ended up back where they started. Older voters had a much smaller surge in March 2020, but those changes have persisted. I assume that it is harder to change an older voter’s mind, so it is quite dramatic to see support for independence among people in their 40s, for example, go from 16.7% in June 2016 to 28.6% in September 2021. Most media coverage about the effect of Hong Kong has focused on young people and their sense of “dried mangos” (existential national crisis), but the more powerful impact might be on older voters who were thoroughly disillusioned by China’s actions.
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One of the interesting rabbit holes I dug into while thinking about this topic was the early days of UI questions. We didn’t get it right the first time. This was back when we were still figuring out lots of things about how to do polls, and we didn’t yet have a lot of standardized questions that we asked in exactly the same form year after year. The first time I can find a UI question is 1991. (We might have asked it in 1989, but I don’t have the 1989 data on my hard drive.)
We didn’t do a national face-to-face survey after the 1991 National Assembly elections, but we did do a national post-election telephone survey. The question asked was:
有人主張要台灣獨立，有人主張要中國統一，也有人認為最好維持現狀，請問您的意見是什麼?
Some people support Taiwan independence, some people support Chinese unification, there are also people who believe it is best to maintain the status quo. What is your opinion?
1991 ESC national telephone survey
%
Taiwan independence
2.6
Chinese unification
18.3
Maintain status quo
62.4
Don’t care
4.3
Don’t know
10.2
Other non-response
11.2
This is a comically disastrous polling result. More people gave a non-response than expressed a preference for unification and independence combined. These answers tell you almost nothing interesting about what people wanted. You certainly can’t use this in vote decision model.
UI wasn’t a trivial question in 1991. The DPP had treated the 1991 National Assembly election as a test case for its independence plank. The entire campaign was centered on its call for independence. The KMT, sensing the unpopularity of the DPP’s position didn’t shy away from this question. In the end, it was a catastrophic result for the DPP, which only managed to get 23.5% of the votes. The KMT won 254 of 325 seats, more than the 75% threshold needed to allow it to unilaterally amend the constitution.
Still, independence must have had more than 2.6% support in the electorate. Remember that Taiwan was still only a few years removed from martial law. People were still hesitant to answer questions openly and honestly, especially when their opinions ran counter to the KMT’s positions. This continued to be a problem until about 1995. So the challenge for the ESC in the early 1990s was to rephrase this question in a way that coaxed hesitant respondents to reveal useful information about themselves while still remaining neutral.
The 1992 post-election survey tried adding a fourth category. It asked the question:
In last year’s legislative election, some people supported Taiwan independence, some people support Chinese unification, some people supported One China One Taiwan, and there were also people who supported maintaining the status quo. What is your opinion?
1992 ESC national post-election survey
%
Taiwan independence
3.6
Chinese unification
17.1
Maintain status quo
52.9
One China, One Taiwan
3.4
Don’t care
2.2
It depends
4.1
No opinion
5.8
Don’t know
9.8
Refuse to answer
1.1
That’s a little better, but not much. You still have 23.0% of people giving non-responses, and more than twice as many people placing themselves in the neutral SQ category as in one of the more interesting positions. You just can’t do much interesting analysis if most people either put themselves in a neutral category or refuse to answer the question.
The ESC scholars revamped the UI question for the 1993 post-election survey, producing what is more or less the modern form.
關於台灣和大陸的關係，有幾種不同的看法，請問您比較偏向那一種?
Concerning the relationship between Taiwan and the Mainland, there are several different opinions. Which one do you lean toward?
[Respondents were shown a card listing the six different options.]
1993 ESC national post-election survey
%
Unification as soon as possible 儘快統一
4.3
Maintain status quo, later move toward unification 維持現狀，以後走向統一
23.2
Maintain status quo, judge the situation, then decide independence or unification 維持現狀，看情形再決定獨立或統一
32.4
Maintain the status quo forever 永遠維持現狀
23.1
Maintain status quo, later move toward independence 維持現狀，以後走向獨立
7.6
Independence as soon as possible 儘快獨立
2.8
Difficult to say
2.1
No opinion
3.8
Don’t know
10.7
Refuse to answer
1.7
This was a major improvement over previous versions. First, the percentage of non-responses was reduced significantly, dropping from 23.0% to 18.3%. Second, the enormous status quo category was cut into two smaller categories. Third and most importantly, more people were coaxed out to express a preference for independence and unification, which is what we really cared about. 17.1% expressed a preference for unification in 1992, while the 1993 wording produced 27.5% support for unification. Similarly, the 1992 survey found 3.6% for independence, while the 1993 survey found 10.4% supporting independence. To the naked eye, it looks as if respondents in the earlier surveys heard “independence” as equivalent to “immediate independence,” and the addition of a less threatening “eventual” independence category coaxed some reticent respondents to reveal a preference.
As for those two SQ categories, it wasn’t simply a matter of cutting a big category into two smaller pieces. Unlike the 2020 data I presented above, those two SQ categories were a bit different in 1993. The SQ forever respondents were a bit more likely to have a Taiwanese identity and a bit less likely to have a dual identity. On exclusively Chinese identity, the two SQ categories were clearly in the middle. Still, these two SQ categories had some subtle differences from each other. This was something scholars could chew on. (Eventually, we collectively decided it wasn’t worth the effort to focus too much on this difference, since other differences were much more powerful. Also, the distinction has faded over time. We didn’t know that in 1994, though.)
1993 ESC post-election
T/C identity
Taiwanese
both
Chinese
Immediate unification
30.0
35.0
31.7
Eventual unification
15.2
47.8
34.8
SQ now, decide later
31.2
46.2
19.9
SQ forever
39.7
35.9
21.8
Eventual independence
36.8
47.2
13.2
Immediate independence
72.5
25.0
2.5
It was somewhere around this time that the ESC made a commitment to track the three big indicators. Since the mid-1990s, we have asked these three questions in every survey we do. It doesn’t matter what the topic is. We might be commissioned to do a survey on health care or gender equality, but we will insist of having these three questions. We are more likely to agree to drop a demographic question than one of these three. To give you an idea of what an enormous investment this is, remember that you can only ask about 30-35 substantive questions in a telephone survey. These three questions are a 10% tax on the available time and space. Those three charts I showed at the beginning of this post don’t represent one survey each year. Each year combines all the surveys we did in that calendar year; each data point represents tens of thousands of respondents. We firmly believe that these are critical to understanding political events in Taiwan.
I have one more point to make. This is more about politics than polling. The DPP went through a monumental shift in the 1990s. In 1990, they adopted the Taiwan independence plank in their party platform, making the pursuit of Taiwan independence a central goal of the party. They were not referring to maintaining the status quo or just maintaining a de facto separation from China. They wanted a formal declaration of independence, a new constitution, and a change of the country’s name from Republic of China to Republic of Taiwan. They did not consider Taiwan to already be independent; independence was something that had to be pursued. As I noted, this was the core appeal in their disastrous 1991 National Assembly campaign. The 1991 election was the first national election with all seats elected, and no one quite knew what to expect. The independence activists were confident that the voters had been waiting for an opportunity to support independence. It turns out they badly misjudged the electorate. The DPP toned down their demands for formal independence in the 1992 legislative elections and did much better. The rest of the 1990s were a gradual process of distancing themselves from the Taiwan Independence Plank. In 1995, Shih Ming-teh 施明德, who was widely understood as a Taiwan independence radical, was elected DPP party chair. Upon taking office, Shih made the momentous declaration that the DPP could not and would not 不能也不會 declare independence if it came to power. As the 2000 presidential election approached and it seemed plausible that the DPP might be competitive or even win, Chen Shui-bian pushed the party to pass the Resolution on Taiwan’s Future 台灣前途決議文, which downgraded the Taiwan Independence Plank to a mere historical document. At some point, the DPP started claiming that the status quo was already independence, and the large group of people who supported maintaining the status quo forever should actually be understood as Taiwan independence supporters. The KMT spent most of the 1990s and 2000s ignoring this shift and gleefully trying to tie the DPP to formal Taiwan independence. For the first two decades of democracy, the conventional wisdom was that formal independence was ballot box poison 票方毒藥。In the Tsai era, we hear almost nothing about formal independence. The status quo is widely understood as de facto independence, and unification would require a dramatic change to the status quo. Unification is now the radical idea that is ballot box poison. It’s amazing what a dramatic shift this has been.
I don’t have any evidence for this, but I wonder if the ESC surveys played some role in this transformation. Elections showed that formal independence was not as popular as activists had thought, and the new surveys backed this up. Meanwhile, the new surveys showed that there was an enormous group in the middle of the electorate that could easily be redefined being for de facto independence. It’s never easy to abandon a cherished position, and formal independence was a cherished position. However, the new surveys might have been a slap in the face telling the DPP elites and activists why they were losing and how to stop losing. It’s possible that the “SQ forever” category has been a catalyst for the modern independence movement.
[1] Tsai didn’t actually get more than twice as many votes as Han. Post-election surveys often find too much support for the winner and not enough for the loser. And turnout wasn’t 88% either. Post-election polls aren’t perfect, and the government won’t let us do exit polls. This is the best we have.
[2] A fair number of respondents will react to these hypothetical conditions by protesting that they are impossible and refusing to answer. Not everyone imagines the same possibilities for the future.
Today’s vote is now complete. In Taipei 5, Freddy Lim 林昶佐 has survived the recall attempt. In the Taichung 2 by-election, the DPP’s Minorta Lin 林靜怡 has defeated the KMT’s Yen Kuan-heng 顏寬恆.
The vote in Taipei 5 was tighter than I expected. From the earliest results, it was pretty clear that the yes votes would outstrip the no votes. Yes ended up with 55.8% of the valid votes. The only question was whether they would pass the threshold of 25% of eligible voters. The KMT needed at least 58,756 yes votes, and they ended up getting 54,813, or 23.3% of eligible voters. 4,000 votes isn’t a comfortable cushion, and for the 45 minutes I thought they might have enough votes.
Interestingly, the main reason the KMT lost is that it didn’t turn out enough votes in Zhongzheng, which was supposed to be their stronger part of the electoral district. Given 55.8% yes votes, 45% turnout would have been enough to pass the threshold. It almost reached that target in Wanhua (43.2%), but it was quite a distance away in Zhongzheng (39.6%). When the election is that close to the threshold, you can point to a million factors and say that each one was decisive. For example, Taiwan has had a few domestic transmissions of Covid in the past few days, so maybe a handful of people didn’t want to risk voting. Or maybe the Sunday election (rather than the normal Saturday) depressed turnout.[1] More probably, the KMT couldn’t quite muster enough anger against Freddy. It was close, though.
The fact that it was so close is another example of how ridiculous the current recall law is. Freddy was elected with 81,853 votes two years ago. There is no evidence that a significant number of those people have changed their minds. In fact, 54,813 is far smaller than the 100,392 who voted for other candidates in that election. That isn’t what I would consider the picture of universal outrage. It is ludicrously easy to overturn an election.
At any rate, Freddy has survived and will be able to finish his term in the legislature.
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Turnout might also have been decisive in Taichung 2, but turnout there was sky high. By-elections usually see turnout in the 30s. 40% is high, though not unheard of. Turnout in Taichung 2 was a whopping 58.3%. That is unheard of. The 2008 legislative election had 58% turnout, and that was a national general election. 58% in a by-election is insane.
A low turnout in this by-election probably would have decisively favored the KMT. Tsai beat Han by 20% in this district in the presidential race, but that election had very high turnout. More specifically, it had extremely high turnout among young voters, who overwhelmingly voted against the KMT. However, young voters are famously inconsistent, and I did not expect many of those voters to show up in this by-election. In a low-turnout election, you expect the voters to be hard-core party supporters on both sides, people in the candidates’ mobilization networks, and only a few other people. The DPP probably has more partisans in this district, but Yen’s powerful local network should have given him a significant advantage. However, that third group was far bigger than could have been expected, and they might have swung the race.
Or maybe turnout wasn’t decisive. As I discussed in the previous post, perhaps the intense national media focus on Yen’s corruption had an impact on the effectiveness of his organizational network.
In 2020, Yen lost by a mere 2.3%. In this election, that margin doubled to 4.6%. That’s not a crushing victory for the DPP, but they were running an unfamiliar candidate with no previous electoral experience. (It seems she turned out to be pretty good at this game, though.) This wasn’t an indication of a KMT collapse, by any means. The KMT is still just about as strong as they were before. As with the recall vote a few months ago, it seems the electoral balance right now is just about the same as it was in January 2020. However, losing is more damaging to patronage-oriented politicians than to those who build their careers on ideas. The latter can shrug off losses and start preparing for the next fight. If you rely on money to motivate your machine, it helps to be in office to secure a steady source on income. Moreover, this campaign pointed out several places for the judicial system to attack the Yen family. The election is over, but the inquiries might continue. Now Yen will have to resist those inquiries as a private citizen, not as a national legislator.[2] Old-school factional politics have been on the decline for a couple decades, and the Yen family’s defeat is one more symbolic step in that process.
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Today’s votes mark the end of the recalls and by-elections, at least for a while. The recall of Kaohsiung mayor Han Kuo-yu sparked a series of KMT-initiated “revenge” recalls.
Kaohsiung city councilor Huang Chieh: recall failed
Taoyuan city councilor Wang Hao-yu: recall succeeded
Taichung 2 legislator Chen Po-wei: recall succeeded but DPP won by-election
Taipei 5 legislator Freddy Lim: recall failed
At the end of this process, the KMT has one clear victory. They (barely) got Wang Hao-yu. Not coincidentally, his electoral district is the bluest of the four. This isn’t a huge reward for all that effort. The KMT has been pursuing a strategy of fighting like hell at the behest of the deep blue wing of their party. Chao Shao-kang has been calling on them to be “the fighting blue” 戰鬥藍, and the Johnny Chiang, Eric Chu, and the rest of the nominal party leaders have obediently followed him. This combative posturing didn’t win the referendums, and it hasn’t produced a great track record in the recalls. The KMT base likes it, but the base is small. The broad masses that the KMT needs to attract don’t seem energized by the KMT’s campaign of resistance.
Perhaps the main reason the “fighting blue” strategy isn’t working is that the general population isn’t as dissatisfied with the DPP’s performance in office as the deep blue believes. President Tsai had a 54.6% satisfaction rating in the December My-Formosa poll, and being 12.6 points above water is pretty darn good. It has been a long time since a sitting president has been this popular in the middle of a term. I was trying to remember the last time a president who wasn’t unpopular going into a round of local elections. It has been a long time.
2018 Tsai: quite unpopular
2014 Ma: extremely unpopular; massive protests
2009-2010 Ma: mildly unpopular
2005-2006 Chen: very unpopular; massive protests
2001-2002 Chen: maybe mildly popular??
1997-1998 Lee popularity was tarnishing; large protests
1993-1994 Lee: popular!
Tsai is probably the most popular president going into local elections in nearly 30 years. We really don’t know what this will mean, since the last time this happened Taiwan was still in the early years of the democratic system. DPP chair Hsu Hsin-liang 許信良 went into the 1993 elections asking voters to give the DPP a mandate by surrounding the central government 以地方包圍中央; since Taiwan had never had a national election and polling was still developing, we didn’t know if that was a reasonable demand. Hsu was sorely disappointed; the KMT did really well in 1993 and 1994. But that was such a different world; it’s probably not a great precedent to understand what just happened or what will unfold over the next year.
Tsai’s popularity has almost certainly been the crucial factor in the recent referendums, recalls, and by-elections. The fightin’ KMT is behaving as an angry electorate wants to send her a message. That is usually a good assumption. In normal years, there probably would have been enough anger to pass the referendums, recall Freddy Lim and Chen Po-wei, and replace them with KMT members. This hasn’t been a normal year, though. Tsai’s resurgence in 2019 was one of the most astounding political reversals I have ever seen. Her ability to maintain that popularity over the past two years has been only slightly less impressive.
The KMT has a lot of advantages going into the local elections. They have lots of popular candidates, and the open seats are pretty favorable. If they can make this a calm election about individual candidates and local issues, they should do pretty well. The worst thing they could do is keep using the fightin’ blue strategy, screaming about how terrible the DPP is and the need to send President Tsai a message. Unless her popularity suddenly tanks, they might find once again that, if it is a choice between Tsai and the KMT, voters still prefer Tsai.
[1] If you want to make those arguments, you have to explain the high turnout in Taichung 2.
[2] His sister is still the deputy speaker of the Taichung city council, so the family isn’t entirely defenseless.
On Sunday, Taiwanese voters in two legislative districts will go to the polls. In Taipei 5, they will vote on whether or not to recall Freddy Lim 林昶佐. In Taichung 2, they recalled their legislator Chen Po-wei 陳柏惟 a few months ago, so on Sunday they will vote to choose the replacement.
I don’t have any special insights or information about either of these votes, but I think it’s worth thinking about the two districts. In 2020, both of these districts elected a legislator who was associated with the green camp but who was not a DPP member. It takes a special kind of district for that to happen. In solid blue districts, the green politician can’t win. In solid green districts, the DPP has an entrenched incumbent or a gaggle of ambitious members eager to take over an empty seat. In swing districts, the DPP usually isn’t willing to step aside for another party. However, under Tsai, the DPP has been willing to leave a few less promising seats open for allied smaller parties. Tsai seems to have a strong belief that the DPP should not seek to ruthlessly squash all smaller competitors, as was the common KMT and DPP practice. Instead, she seems willing to let them develop their organizations with the assumption that they will end up in a larger DPP-led coalition. Small party supporters overwhelmingly voted vote Tsai and, to a lesser extent, DPP district legislative candidates in 2020, so maybe this is smart strategy.
Moreover, sometimes the smaller party wins one of those “less promising” seats. This is not usually because the smaller parties have fantastic candidates who can build bigger coalitions than a DPP candidate could have. Rather, the district usually wasn’t all that hopeless to begin with. In 2016, the DPP designated any district in which their 2012 legislative candidate had gotten less than 42.5% as “difficult,” and it yielded some of these to smaller parties. However, there are lots of reasons a DPP candidate might do badly: it could be a very blue district, it might have a very popular KMT incumbent, a small party might split the vote, or it might just be a lousy DPP candidate. It’s also important to remember that districts change. Developments go up, and people move in and out.
At first glance, Taipei 5 doesn’t look like a classic “difficult” DPP district. The DPP’s strongest areas in Taipei are along the Tamsui River, where the city first grew up back in the Qing and Japanese areas. When the KMT showed up and needed to find spaces for all of its followers, the areas to the east were much emptier. And over the next few decades, the development was all to the east, and the old neighborhoods slid into decay. Wanhua 萬華 is the oldest part of Taipei, and it has been one of the DPP’s best areas in Taipei since before there even was a DPP. However, Wanhua has changed in the last two decades. Developers realized that it had some of the lowest land prices remaining in the core urban area, and Wanhua has seen a fair amount of new, expensive housing go up. The people moving into Wanhua have been a bit bluer than the old residents. More importantly, Wanhua is only half of Taipei 5. The other half is Zhongzheng 中正. The Qing bureaucrats didn’t want to get involved with the rivalry between (modern) Wanhua to the south and (modern) Datong to the north, so they established the government center in (modern) Zhongzheng in between those two towns. The Presidential Building, the Legislative Yuan, the Executive Yuan, and most of the central government ministries are in Zhongzheng. When the KMT arrived, many of their most important followers established residency in Zhongzheng. Juancun 眷村 is usually translated as military village, but in Zhongzheng the juancun were mostly filled with high- and middle-ranking civil servants and their dependents. Today, most of the juancun are gone, but Zhongzheng is still disproportionately filled with civil servants. While this is changing, civil servants are still more likely to vote blue than green.
The upshot is that Taipei 5 hasn’t been as blue as most of the rest of Taipei, but during the Chen and Ma eras it was more blue than green. It was the type of place that the DPP might win every now and then if everything went right. In 2012, the DPP nominated a city councilor which a few problems who could only manage 42.4% of the vote. And that was how it came to be designated a “difficult” district and left open for the NPP and Freddy Lim. However, when the partisan lines shifted after Ma’s turbulent 2nd term, Taipei 5 shifted from slightly blue to slightly green. Lim won in 2016 and 2020 by soaking up Tsai Ing-wen voters. I suspect most of the DPP city councilors would have also narrowly won this district.
If you take all 73 legislative districts and arrange them in order of Tsai Ing-wen’s vote share in the 2020 presidential elections from worst to best, Taipei 5 is #26. That is to say, if the KMT is going to win a legislative majority, it needs to win Taipei 5. If the DPP can win Taipei 5, it’s probably going to have a solid legislative majority. That has been the case in the last two elections. In 2020, Tsai beat Han in Taipei 5 by 13.9% (54.8% to 40.9%). However, Tsai ran ahead of most of the DPP candidates, and most of the KMT candidates ran ahead of Han. On average, Tsai was 7.9% better than green legislative candidates while Han was 3.2% worse. If the candidates in Taipei 5 were average, Freddy should have won by a narrow 2.8%. In fact, he won by 3.0%, almost exactly that margin.
If you were a KMT strategist looking to target someone for a recall, Freddy was an obvious candidate. Most importantly, of course, he is not a DPP member. The KMT has concentrated its fire on small party politicians who don’t have a solid local network to support them rather than directly challenging the DPP. (It feels a bit like the Cold War, when the USA and USSR fought their battles in places like Angola and Nicaragua rather than directly facing off against each other.) He’s also Freddy Lim, and blue politicians and voters still can’t fathom how they have lost to THIS GUY – twice!! That aside, it helps that this is a marginal district for the green side. There are enough blue voters in Taipei 5 to give the recall reasonable hope of success.
Taichung 2 is a very different district. It’s part of the old Taichung County, stretching along the southwest part of the old Taichung City from the coast nearly to the foothills of the Central Mountain Range between the Dadu Mountain (between the city and county) and the Dadu River (between Taichung and Changhua). The five townships[1] are the kinds of places where people think of themselves as living in small towns even though the rest of the world would think of them as outright urban. When I lived in Nantou, I went through Wufeng 霧峰 every time I went to Taichung. It was the most rural part of my trip, but even Wufeng had a significant downtown area. Historically, it is the home of the Wufeng Lin clan, one of the four or five great clans of the Japanese era.[2] The three towns in the middle of Taichung 2, Lungching 龍井, Dadu 大肚, and Wuri 烏日, form a county assembly district and are often thought of as a single group.[3] Some of my earliest experiences in Taiwan were in Lungching, which includes the neighborhood right outside Tunghai Unversity. This area also includes Chenggongling 成功嶺, a military installation that was traditionally the first place for draftees in central Taiwan. Nowadays, the area is changing quickly due to the presence of the Taichung high speed rail station. Between 2008 and 2020, the number of eligible voters in Taichung 2 increased from just under 250,00 to just under 300,000.[4]
Taichung 2 has long been the stomping grounds of Yen Ching-piao 顏清標. Yen got into politics winning a seat in the county assembly in early 1994. Later that year, he moved up to the provincial assembly. At the time, the media often referred to him as a leader of the Zongguanxian 縱貫線 Gang. In the 1990s, Taichung was littered with brightly lit “barber shops” (ie: brothels), and it was evident to anyone paying attention that organized crime was pretty profitable. This was the heyday of organized crime in KMT local politics, but Yen usually ran as an independent. Evidently, he was too toxic even for the KMT. After a stint back in the county assembly (where he was elected speaker), he moved to the legislature, where he served four terms. He was stripped of his seat for illegally using public money to visit hostess bars, but his son Yen Kuan-heng 顏寬恆won the by-election. Yen’s daughter is now the city council vice speaker. Yen has an extensive network on the ground. I don’t know if he can still do widespread vote buying, as was common back when he broke into politics, but the rest of his operation feels like a throwback to the glory days of “black and gold politics.”
Nonetheless, Taichung 2 is changing. With the population group, new people are moving in who aren’t part of the old mobilization networks. Moreover, as with the rest of Taichung County, this is no longer a desert for the DPP. In 2020, Tsai Ing-wen won Taichung 2 by 20.4% (57.5% to 37.1%). In the ranking of the 73 districts by her vote share, Taichung 2 came in at #37, which makes it exactly the national median district. Since the DPP won a clear majority, you would expect this to be solidly in the DPP column. However, all things are not equal. The Yen family runs Taichung 2, and you can see the impact in the votes. The average KMT candidate ran 3.2% ahead of Han; Yen ran a whopping 11.7% ahead. He didn’t win, but he only lost by 2.2% rather than the 9.3% you would expect with generic candidates.
In a recall, fewer voters turn out, and Yen’s local organizational advantage should be magnified. Again, this was a logical place to try a recall vote, both because the incumbent was not a DPP member and because the special local circumstances gave them hopes of winning.
All this said, if I had to bet, I’d probably bet against the KMT in both races. In Taipei 5, there just doesn’t seem to be much enthusiasm around the recall. The media coverage is pretty sparse, and it doesn’t feel like many people are furious at Freddy. I’m expecting that that yes and no votes will be close and that neither will hit the 25% turnout threshold. Taichung 2, which has no legal threshold, is much more intense. As Donovan Smith has pointed out, the grand break with the past in this by-election is that the media has suddenly overcome its collective fear of accusing the Yen family of corruption. Suddenly, the Yen family is facing a multitude of accusations. I suspect that the weight of all these charges will have an impact. Candidates like Yen are best when they can slip under the radar. However, this race has been the focus of most media coverage for the last two months. Even during the last days of the referendum campaign, the talk shows were more eager to talk about Yen and corruption than the imminent referendums. The Yen family has never been under such a harsh spotlight. Organizational votes involve a vote broker telling the voter that the candidate is one of us, a good guy who we can trust to look out for us. Suddenly, voters have a lot of competing information telling them that actually he isn’t such a good guy. I expect that this vote will be close, but I think I’d rather be in the DPP candidate’s shoes.
[1] Yes, I know they have technically been “districts” for a decade. I’m stuck in the past.
[2] We Nantou people have never forgiven the dastardly Lin clan for stealing so much land from the noble and honorable Hung clan of Tsaotun. Ironically, one of my wife’s aunts married into the Lin clan, and I never miss an opportunity remind them of their rapacious perfidy!
[3] Together, they are often referred to as dawulong 大烏龍, which can also loosely be translated as a “big fucking mess.” Sometimes Taiwan gives us strange and wonderful gifts.
[4] It was actually over 250,000 in 2008, but that includes nearly 10,000 voters from Dali who have since been shifted into Taichung 7.
Frozen Garlic 