Asia

This study examines the causes of changes in Taiwanese political parties’ policy platforms between 1991 and 2004.Fell begins his analysis by identifying social welfare, political corruption and national identity as the three most salient electoral issues of that period.These three topics then serve as case studies with which the author utilises election material, party propaganda content analysis and in-depth interviews with senior Taiwanese politicians, as well as public opinion surveys to trace the evolution of party policies on these issues in each election. Through effective use of both qualitative and quantitative research approaches, Fell is able to argue persuasively that the internal balance of power between each party’s election-orientated and ideological-orientated factions/leaders has been the key determinant of party change. Due for the most part to the former’s responsiveness to voter preferences, Taiwanese party politics has gradually become less polarised with their policies converging towards the centre, while the strength of conservative or ideologicalorientated factions ensures that a moderate degree of policy differentiation continues to exist, thus enabling elections to remain healthily issue based rather than degenerating into issueless popularity contests. Despite the success of this study, its static and dichotomous categorisation of party leaders into either election-orientated or ideologicalorientated types fails to capture the not uncommon dynamic change of political orientations of these leaders throughout their political journeys. In addition, as the bulk of the study traces party changes on an election-by-election basis, this volume could have been enriched by more in-depth investigation of influential political developments not directly related to elections, such as the ‘Wild Lily Student Movement’ (Yebaihe xueyun) and inter-generational power struggles within both the KMT and DPP. Also, while the prose is approachable and the range of statistics and graphs used greatly strengthens its arguments, at times its presentation has been impeded by understandable Chinese translation errors and word processing omissions, particularly in the national identity chapter. Nevertheless, this wellbalanced book does an excellent job of exploring the process of moderate party convergence in Taiwanese party politics and is recommended to researchers interested in the Third Wave Democracies and the study of democratisation processes in general.