December 9, 2014, by Katharine Adeney

The State of the Taiwan politics field

Written by Dr Jon Sullivan, Contemporary Chinese Studies, University of Nottingham.

As a western academic working on Taiwan, the health of Taiwan studies is something that has concerned me for several years. As a PhD student attending the European Association of Taiwan Studies conference in Madrid in 2009, I listened to the eminent American Taiwan scholar Murray Rubinstein’s keynote titled “Taiwan Studies is Dead”. For a young academic-in-training, Professor Rubinstein’s talk, and the discussion it generated among delegates afterwards, was an enlightening experience. The talk convincingly set out the reasons why Taiwan’s marginal position in international society was also mirrored inside the academy. Two years later I published two related papers: one in Issues & Studies entitled “Mapping the Taiwan Studies Field” and another in The China Quarterly entitled “Is Taiwan Studies in Decline?” The answer to the latter question, using a diverse range of metrics, was a resounding “No”. Despite facing a number of issues, some of them shared by all disciplines and the Higher Education sector generally, I found Taiwan Studies (at least in the Anglophone west which I analysed) to be buoyant and generating greater academic interest than ever before.

For all the problems of disputed status and political recognition, Taiwan is a powerhouse global economy, liberal democracy and globally respected for its achievements in technology. Similarly, despite the alleged reluctance of editors, funders, journals and universities to publish, fund and hire people working on Taiwan, the amount and range of academic research being done on Taiwan is hugely diverse and increasingly abundant. As a political scientist, and having identified political science and IR as the fields in which the majority of Taiwan Studies work falls, the next step in my assessment of the health of the field was to examine recent trends in political research” and I am grateful to the Institute of Asia Pacific Studies and the Taiwan Studies Program (administered by the China Policy Institute) both at the University of Nottingham, for supporting me in this endeavour.

I took Shelley Rigger’s 2002/3 paper published in Issues & Studies as my reference point as it was the last state of the field survey of Taiwan politics research. And given the slow pace of the academic research and publishing processes, a dozen years is just about enough time for “new trends” to become apparent. The empirical basis for my study was all academic journal articles published on the subject of Taiwan (the “superset”) and Taiwanese politics in the last decade (2004-14). My research assistant and I collected, read and coded hundreds of articles published in English language disciplinary and area specific journals. In her earlier paper, Shelley Rigger described Taiwan studies as essentially “marginal, but healthy,” and several data sources suggest this still pertains.

Consider for instance that across 17 China/East Asia studies journals in the last decade close to 12% of all papers dealt with Taiwan. In some journals, notably the Taiwan-based Issues and Studies and the American Journal of Chinese Studies (associated with the North American Association of Taiwan Studies), Taiwan research papers accounted for almost half of all published output. Yet the publication outlets where Taiwan research most frequently appears (the two noted above plus East Asia: An International Quarterly and Taiwan Journal of Democracy), are, in terms of impact factor and reputation, relatively marginal. In the higher impact journals (The China Quarterly and China Journal for instance), the proportion of Taiwan articles decreases to around 5%.

Another feature that Professor Rigger identified was that the venues for publishing on Taiwanese politics were “sprawling and diverse”. That observation remains an accurate reflection of the field. But while research on Taiwanese politics has been published in an astonishing range of journals covering many cognate (and also far distant) disciplines, these journals again tend to be lower impact ones within the respective field.

One area where Taiwan is increasing its visibility is in the presence of Taiwan politics research in the top political science and IR journals. In the top 50 political science and IR journals (as measured by 5 year impact factor) over the past three decades, Taiwan is increasingly represented; from 35 articles in the 1980s, to 87 in the nineties and 117 in the noughties. Although there are periodic spikes of interest coinciding with presidential election years, there is consistently greater interest post-2000, the year that Chen Shui-bian won the presidency. I believe that this interest can be explained by the fact that many observers identified this juncture as the moment that Taiwan became a consolidated democracy, and thus became integrated into cross-national and comparative work on various features of democracy (parties, voting, institutions). Fairly or not, Chen Shui-bian’s rule was also characterized as being pro-independence and the cause of tensions with China (although my China Quarterly paper with Will Lowe, “Chen Shui-bian: On Independence”, disputes this claim), demanding greater attention from the American security crowd. As a result, the greater representation of Taiwan politics research in top disciplinary journals is driven by journals focusing on democracy (Journal of Democracy, Electoral Studies) and security/foreign policy (Foreign Affairs, International Affairs, International Security, Washington Quarterly, Survival). In the top generalist (APSR, AJPS, JOP, BJPS) and comparative (CPS, CP, WP) journals, Taiwan seldom featured. The cold comfort is that Taiwan is increasingly likely to be included as a case in large-n comparative studies.

Within Taiwan Studies, political science is the dominant discipline. In the last decade around one third of papers dealt with politics, increasing to around two thirds when we include IR and security in our definition of politics. Within that, the major focus of interest is institutions (including political parties), followed by public opinion/ elections/voting and public policy. Coding the content of Taiwan politics research papers published in disciplinary journals in the past decade, I found that institutions were the central focus of one third of articles and the subsidiary concern for a further quarter.  Public opinion/ elections/voting were the main focus of one fifth of articles and secondary focus in a further one fifth. Contrary to the period covered by Professor Rigger in her earlier survey, national identity and democratization are no longer the most salient focal points of research on Taiwanese politics, combining for just one fifth of papers.

In terms of “new trends”, research on Taiwanese politics is becoming more pluralistic. First, as intimated above, there is huge diversity in disciplinary approaches applied to Taiwan’s politics, not just from cognate fields like economics and sociology, but anthropology, geography, linguistics and other fields further away from political science. The application, borrowing and modification of concepts and methods from these diverse fields is a positive development, and may help to explain the opening up of research interests away from the previous hegemonic national identity and democratization. The field is also more pluralistic in terms of the subjects that are now acknowledged to be sites of political expression or competition, e.g. baseball, dramas, use of language, religious pilgrimage, urban planning, curriculum, waste plants, migration, economic agreements etc. Similarly, there is greater inclusivity in ‘who does politics’, and the dramatis personae in politics research now includes Taishang, guest-workers, mainland brides, housewives, disabled people, gravel extractors, NGOs etc. This move beyond traditional elites, particularly party politicians, is especially visible in last few years as social movements have expanded both on the ground in the pages of academic journals.

It is nearly two decades since Lee Teng-hui became the first directly elected President in ROC history. This longer time frame has enabled researchers to take a longer-term view on political developments, manifest in a move away from “crisis studies” and stronger historical contextualization of the Lee and Chen Shui-bian presidencies. Most studies have now moved on from “this is uniquely crisis-like” to “this is how Taiwanese politics is”. Because Taiwan has now enjoyed most features of a liberal democracy for almost 20 years, these additional “data points” have encouraged longitudinal studies on a wide range of institutional and individual behaviours. The Chen administrations’ commitment to e-government and other moves designed to increase transparency have created huge amounts of data (which I report on in my China Quarterly paper “Electronic resources in the study of elite political behaviour in Taiwan”). In particular, there have been advances at the sub-national level which have encouraged researchers to look within-case to expand their studies on a variety of different types of political behaviour from budgets to divided government to election campaigning. As a result, we know more about politics at the local level, and these insights have fed into analyses at the national level.

Research on Taiwanese politics is now more comparative than it was when Professor Rigger wrote her piece. One of the calls she made in that paper was for greater use of Taiwan as a case study and greater connections between Taiwan specialists and comparative scholars. Both of these have happened. Having become a fully-fledged democracy has gained Taiwan entry into long term cross-national studies such as the World Values Survey, Asia Barometer and various Comparative Election studies. Taiwan has also become an attractive case for scholars interested in “Confucian heritage” democracies (Korea, Japan), “small advanced economies” (Ireland, Israel) and Chinese societies (PRC, Hong Kong, Singapore). The developmental trajectories and experiences of Taiwan and Korea share many features in common, and comparison with Korea has emerged as a major research area, with particular focus on political institutions, voting behaviour, political attitudes and foreign policy behaviour under strong constraints.

Professor Rigger commented in 2002/3 that several areas that dominated in the study of Taiwan (the developmental state, democratization, national identity) were losing their attractiveness, or even coming to the end of their life cycles. Good news for the Taiwanese politics field is that there has been renewal and the emergence of new areas of interest. Moving away from democratization processes, much research is now concerned with the “quality” and performance of Taiwan’s democracy (and looks much like studies of the US and other advanced democratic polities). However, while the data and methods have increased in reliability and sophistication, the over-exploitation of opinion data like the Taiwan Election and Democratization Study, especially by Taiwan-based scholars, has led to incremental progress at best (and, dare I say, many “fishing expeditions”). Increasing sophistication has been accompanied by a lack of innovation, and opportunities afforded by excellent quality data have not been fully leveraged (e.g. in terms of data linking). In consequence, there is a distinct lack of conceptual progress, especially among quantitative researchers. Much work involves theory testing (i.e. choosing some theory from another context, usually the US, and applying it to the Taiwan case without much thought to what such studies actually tell us) rather than theory building, and yet more work stays away from theory altogether. In general, compared to the previous decade, contributions in the noughties have been less impressive, despite better and more abundant data.

While a segment of the field remains fixated on national identity, the saturation of this area and the apparent emergence of inequality as an overriding economic cleavage have dampened enthusiasm and opened up the field to investigations in a greater variety of areas. Gender, migration, social movements have greatly increased in visibility. Research on the latter, for instance by Ho Ming-sho at National Taiwan University, accounts for, in my opinion, some of the most significant research in the past decade. The emergence and popularization of the social web during the past decade as a potential influence on a variety of political behaviours at the elite and mass levels is well represented, as are approaches rooted in queer theory, post-colonialism, post-structuralism and multiculturalism.

Yet, the more things change the more they stay the same. China of course continues to loom large in research on Taiwan, and on Taiwanese politics. Distinct from the preoccupation of many scholars on cross-Strait relations, many analyses of Taiwanese domestic politics appear motivated by a concern for how the behaviour and attitudes of elites and masses in Taiwan will affect relations between Taiwan and China, China and the US and the broader security environment in the Asia-Pacific. I remain ambivalent about this: on one hand, it ensures that Taiwan will not disappear from sight despite the intellectual and professional attractions of China. On the other hand, analysing Taiwanese domestic politics through the lens of cross- or international relations can be counterproductive and lead to distortions. Finally, today as in the nineties, the field remains riven by multiple divisions. Collaboration between scholars based in Taiwan and those outside of Taiwan remains low (as measured by co-authored publications). This is a curious, since Taiwanese scholars are welcoming and many of them trained in the US and professional goals are shared across continents (manifest for example in reading and targeting the same journals). There are also synergies that could usefully underpin collaboration—which for some reason are not being exploited. Perhaps the division is explained by academic upbringing: many Taiwanese scholars trained in American political science programs and tend to the quantitative, while western scholars are more likely to have entered Taiwan Studies through Chinese language and area studies departments).

• Share on Facebook
• Share on Twitter
• Share on Google+
• Share on LinkedIn