The way that parties react to electoral setbacks is often closely tied to the internal power structure and power struggles in the aftermath of the election. Parties also need to face the demands of competing goals, and the way they react to electoral defeat may be affected by whether the party prioritises goals such as winning votes or office, party ideals or representing members’ interests.
While much of the literature on the way parties deal with electoral defeat relies on cases in European party systems, a number of studies have also been conducted on mainstream parties in Taiwan. In this paper we have chosen to focus on the case of one of the oldest movement parties in Taiwan, the Green Party Taiwan. We examine how the party has dealt with electoral defeat and if it can be said to have learnt the right lessons of defeat. Since movement parties are generally seen as prioritising policy or ideological goals over electoral success, we are interested to see whether the Green Party’s responses to defeat differ from earlier studies of Taiwan’s mainstream parties.
We address these questions by looking at the party’s response to three national election campaigns in 2012, 2016 and 2020. In order to operationalise the way the party reacted to the electoral setbacks, we look at the following indicators of post-election change: (1) leadership change, (2) internal balance of power, (3) organizational change, (4) change in the alliance strategies, (5) programmatic change. We plot how the party has changed on these indicators by examining the nature of the party in the next rounds of elections. This then allows us to make a judgement on whether the party had learnt the right or wrong lessons of defeat. The analysis relies on a series of interviews with Green Party Taiwan figures over the last ten years, party political communication material, as well as participant observation data.
About the speaker
DAFYDD J. FELL is a Professor of Comparative Politics at the Department of Politics and International Studies of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He is also the Director of the SOAS Centre of Taiwan Studies. In 2004 he helped establish the European Association of Taiwan Studies. He has published numerous articles on political parties and electioneering in Taiwan. His first book was Party Politics in Taiwan (Routledge, 2005), which analyzed party change in the first fifteen years of multi-party competition. His second book was Government and Politics in Taiwan (Routledge, 2011) and the second edition was published in early 2018. He has edited a number of volumes on Taiwan, with the most recent Taiwan Studies Revisited, published in 2019, Taiwan’s Economic and Diplomatic Challenges and Opportunities (2021) and Taiwan’s Contemporary Indigenous Peoples (2021). His latest single authored book is Taiwan’s Green Parties (Routledge 2021) and is currently working with three co-authors on a Chinese version of the book. He is also the book series editor for the Routledge Research on Taiwan Series.