What Has Replaced Clientelism? The Continuity and Change of Political Linkage in Yunlin County under Political Cleavage and Electoral Institution Change
Date Issued
2011
Date
2011
Author(s)
Lu, Hsin-Hung
Abstract
Factional politics is one of the features in Taiwan local politics. The exchange of particular interest under clientelism constitutes the political linkage between politician-politician and politician-voter in the factional politics. However, political linkage based on the exchange of particular interest has negative effects on democratic accountability. Voters may be more interested in the particular interest offered by the politician rather than the contents of his platform. Since 2005, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) has enlarged its electoral base in Yunlin County, while factions within the Kuomintang (KMT) fought against each other and dissolved. Does this represent a changing political linkage in Yunlin County? Will clientelism be replaced by party image and label managed by political parties on national scale? What are the linkages between voters and politicians in Yunlin County, and how could we explain the emergence and operation of such linkages?
Previous researches have mostly dealt with the phenomen of clientelism during an authoritarian period, and understood it as the mobilization and control by the authoritarian regime or as the product of social context in local society. But these researches have not illustrated the change after democratization. The modernization and institutional change can not explain the interview data that I collected in Yunlin County. The data shows that although KMT politicians was affected by the party, new electoral institution, and social change, they still attempted to construct factional organization, broker network, and gain votes by offering particular interests. DPP politicians, mainly adopted their party label to gain voter support. At the same time, they also distributed particular interests to their supporters, and even tried to gain the support of non-partisan voters through the distribution of particular interests. The similar feature between these two parties is that they both lack an alternative model for resource distribution, which can replace the distribution of particular interests. Therefore, both parties continue to offer particular interests and maintain a certain degree of clientelistic linkage strategy. In this research, I propose that such phenomenon of political linkages is caused by the special political cleavage in Taiwan. Since the political cleavage in Taiwan is constituted with nationalism and ethnicism, which lack the connotation of resources distribution, and also impede other social cleavage to become the stake of political struggle. Politicians of both parties in Yunlin do not have strategies that can replace the distribution of particular interests, thus they can only continue to rely on clientelistic linkage.
Subjects
faction
clientelism
political cleavage
local politics
party politic
SDGs
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