Monday, January 14, 2008

Scholars differ over impact of new election system on DPP defeat

Taipei, Jan.14 (CNA) A majority of scholars participating in a roundtable Monday believed that the ruling Democratic Progressive Party's (DPP) humiliating setback in the legislative election was the result of the new electoral system.

The DPP won only 27 of the 113 seats (23.9 percent) up for grabs on Saturday, and only 13 of the 73 where lawmakers were elected in single representative districts, a big drop from the nearly 40 percent of the seats it won in 2004 when multiple representatives were chosen from each district.

The major falloff was the direct result of the new single member district voting system, which favored the KMT, said Hans Stockton, director of the Study Abroad Programs Center for International Studies at the Houston, Texas-based University of St. Thomas.

Stockton said economic factors in the DPP's defeat have been overstated while, according to his research, the impact of the new electoral system has been understated.

Based on a simulation, Stockton estimated that the DPP would have won somewhere near 35 seats at minimum under the old multi-representative system used in 2004, Stockton said.

Academia Sinica researcher Michael Hsiao suggested that the DPP may have been the victim of its own naivete, even though it knew full well when it launched the new electoral system in 2005 that the system would benefit the KMT in the short term.

"The DPP introduced the [new] system out of idealism...and probably out of naivete and optimism, " Hsiao said.

The new system helped the KMT because of its strong ties with local factions and networks that had been nurtured over the past 50 years, while proving unfavorable to the DPP, which "had no real local base," Hsiao contended.

The KMT went along with the system in 2005, the researcher said, because it knew it stood to gain from its implementation.

Soochow University professor Hsu Yung-ming pinned some of the blame directly on President Chen Shui-bian. Hsu suggested Chen miscalculated by thinking that an increasing awareness of Taiwanese identity would bolster DPP support and overcome the disadvantages of the new voting system.

Some scholars believed, however, that other factors were more important than structural voting issues.

"The electoral system is not in any way to blame " for the DPP's poor showing, said Shih Cheng-feng, a professor at Tamkang University.

Shih attributed the DPP's downfall primarily to the administration's poor economic performance and its arrogance in handling the controversies over the voting procedure in Saturday's elections and renaming the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall.