Date｜2022/12/23 

Time｜14:00 - 15:30

Venue｜Rm. 931, 9F in Social Sciences Building

Speaker｜Dafydd Fell (Professor of Comparative Politics at the Department of Politics and International Studies of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London)

Speech Abstract｜

Electoral defeat is often viewed as the mother of party change. However, studies show that parties do not necessary learn the right lessons of defeat. 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.

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 speech, Prof. Dafydd Fell has chosen to focus on the case of one of the oldest movement parties in Taiwan, the Green Party Taiwan and examining 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, it is interesting to see whether the Green Party’s responses to defeat differ from earlier studies of Taiwan’s mainstream parties. 

To address these questions, Prof. Fell will look 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, the following five indicators of post-election change will be examined:

(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.