The Origins and Decline of Dominant Party Systems:Taiwan's Transition in Comparative Perspective.

Dominant Party;Party System;Democratization;Taiwan;Multiparty Competition;Party System Change;East Asian Languages and Cultures;Political Science;Social Sciences;Political Science

Templeman, Kharis AliLittle, Daniel E. ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Dominant Party;    Party System;    Democratization;    Taiwan;    Multiparty Competition;    Party System Change;    East Asian Languages and Cultures;    Political Science;    Social Sciences;    Political Science;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/91373/kharist_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

Dominant party systems are those in which a single party or coalition rules for an extraordinary period of time by regularly winning contested, multiparty elections.In this dissertation I consider two questions raised by these party systems.The first is about origins: what causes the emergence of ruling parties with systematic advantages over all their competitors in the party system?The second is about persistence: what affects the survival of such ;;advantaged” ruling parties?To answer these questions, I collect data on the duration in office of ruling parties in all electorally-contested regimes (ECRs) in the world since 1950.On the first question, I find that most long-lived ruling parties began as ;;first-movers” in the party system: they were the first parties to take office in newly-founded ECRs.Because they played a central role in shaping the regime that they then competed in, long-lived ruling parties typically held a large partisan advantage over their competitors in the party system—what I term high party system asymmetry.Thus, the typical dominant party system occurs at the beginning of a contested regime, when party competition is highly asymmetric, and gradually breaks down into a more competitive party system over timeOn the second question, I find the type of executive regime—presidential versus parliamentary—has an important effect on ruling party survival.Advantaged ruling parties are significantly more vulnerable to defeat in presidential than in parliamentary regimes, all else equal, and this effect is greatest in the most asymmetric party systems.I also find that economic growth and state repression improve ruling party survival rates, while the size of the state does not appear to have a meaningful effect on survival.I demonstrate the utility of the theory in the case of Taiwan, where an advantaged ruling party, the Kuomintang or KMT, lost power only four years after the first presidential election.I explain this defeat as a consequence primarily of presidentialism: if the KMT had adopted a parliamentary regime, it almost certainly would not have lost.