Cleavage structure and the demise of a dominant party: The role of national identity in the fall of the KMT in Taiwan
| Author | Nathan F Batto |
| Published date | 01 March 2019 |
| Date | 01 March 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/2057891118788202 |
| Subject Matter | Research articles |
Research article
Cleavage structure and the
demise of a dominant party:
The role of national identity
in the fall of the KMT in Taiwan
Nathan F Batto
Institute of Political Science, Academia Sinica, Taiwan and Election Study Center,
National Chengchi University, Taiwan
Abstract
The KMT’s electoral defeat in 2016 was not a case of a dominant party crashing to defeat due to
mismanaging its factions or ineptly allocating state resources. This article illustrates a third path by
which dominant parties can lose power. The KMT lost because the underlying cleavage structure
slowly shifted and eroded the KMT’s political foundations over a quarter century. Indeed, the
KMT had ceased to be a dominant party long before 2016; that election was merely a particularly
dramatic step in what was actually a long decline. Taiwan has a single dominant political cleavage
defined by national identity. Since the early 1990s, exclusive Taiwanese identity has gradually
increased and eventually replaced both Taiwanese and Chinese identity as the majority dis-
position. As the cleavage line gradually shifted, the KMT tried to develop other appeals, but these
were only successful as long as they did not directly clash with the dominant national identity
cleavage.
Keywords
1992 Consensus, cleavage, dominant party, identity, Taiwan
The Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, KMT) has dominated politics in Taiwan since the end
of the Second World War. It established an authoritarian party-state that ruled Taiwan through the
1980s, and it continued to hold power by winning elections after the new democratic regime took
shape in the early and mid-1990s. Even when it lost the presidency in 2000 and 2004, it main-
tained a foothold on power as the largest party in the majority coalition in the legislature. In 2008,
Corresponding author:
Nathan F Batto, Institute of Political Science, Academia Sinica, Taiwan and Election Study Center, National Chengchi
University, Taiwan.
Email: nbatto@gate.sinica.edu.tw
Asian Journal of Comparative Politics
2019, Vol. 4(1) 81–101
ªThe Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/2057891118788202
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it roared back into full control, winning a landslide in the presidential election and an overwhelm-
ing majority in the legislature. For 70 years, the KMT was never completely out of power. This
changed dramatically in 2016, when the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) won decisive
victories in both the presidential and legislative elections. In the presidential vote, the KMT fell
from 51.6% in 2012 to 31.0%, while in the legislative party list vote, the KMT plunged from
44.5% to 26.9%. Without the presidency, only 35 (of 113 total) seats in the legislature, and only
one of six major local governments, the KMT was left with almost no significant elected
institutional power base.
Why did the KMT finally lose power? Boucek argues that the success or failure of dominant
parties in managing their factions is the key to whether they will be able to stay in power (Boucek,
2012). The last three years of the KMT’s tenure were rife with examples of self-destructive
factional infighting. Conversely, Greene argues that dominant parties use their control of state
resources to build political support (Greene, 2007). The KMT’s local factions were furious at their
treatment by party leaders and repeatedly asked why the flow of patronage had been shut off. Both
of these perspectives are based on the assumption that a dominant party can remain dominant if it
can simply manage not to break apart.
However, I argue that the KMT did not lose because it was disunited; the disunity merely
amplified the size of the loss. Rather, it lost because the accumulation of slow and incremental
shifts in the underlying cleavage structure had made holding together its old majority coalition ever
more difficult. By 2016, the ground had shifted so far that the KMT might not have won even if it
had been able to unify its factions and consolidate all of its potential support in the electorate. Once
the KMT ran into a series of setbacks causing voters to question their previous loyalties, voters
naturally gravitated toward the parties on their side of the identity cleavage line, and there simply
were not enough of them on the KMT’s side of that line.
In this article, I look at how the gradual rise of Taiwanese identity and erosion of Chinese
identity in the electorate over the past quarter century has led to the decline of the KMT. The
second section of this article discusses notions of dominant parties. While the KMT was seemingly
entrenched in power, it had ceased to be a dominant party long before the 2016 defeat at the ballot
box. The third section discusses how political cleavages shape party systems and the nature of the
national identity cleavage in Taiwan. The fourth section covers the interplay between the national
identity cleavage and party politics in Taiwan over the past quarter century. This section demon-
strates that, since national identity became established as the dominant political cleavage line in the
second half of 1990s, party politics and election outcomes have been closely entwined with
identity. Of course, short-term factors such as corruption scandals, highly skilled or charismatic
candidates, and other assorted issues such as pension reform, nuclear power, and economic
strategy have also had some effect on political outcomes, but none of these issues has endured
in the public conscience for very long or fundamentally reshaped the part y system. National
identity stands alone as the primary factor shaping politics over the past quarter century. The fifth
section turns to the events of President Ma’s second term which eventually led to the 2016 election
debacle. Politicians are constrained by the cleavage structure, but they can nevertheless act stra-
tegically in attempts to improve their positions. Ma’s 1992 Consensus was a strategic effort to hold
the old KMT coalition together by arguing that Taiwanese identity was not incompatible with
economic integration with China. However, the ambiguity that made this appeal so effective in
2008 and 2012 had become clarified by the 2016 election. When voters realigned their partisan
preferences along the 2016 identity lines, the KMT was swept out of power. The sixth section
revisits and rejects the argument that factionalism may have caused the KMT’s defeat in 2016.
82 Asian Journal of Comparative Politics 4(1)
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