The Political Logic Of Collective Actions

At the end of the 1980s,the Kuomintang(KMT)authority moved the martial law and gradually pushed forward the reform.The shift of the political structure is accompanied by the relaxation of the control,and collective action has gradually been an acceptable approach for Taiwan people to appealing demands,no matter it is a vulnerable group such as leprosy patients,workers,farmers,or the relative elite class such as intellectuals,students,white-collar workers,even government officers.Since the 1980s,the forms of appealing demands,also known as Contentious Repertoires in this study,have evolved over and over again.In late 1980s,protestors used folk religion elements as repertoires,so we can observed ritualized repertoires such as funeral protests and divinations.By the early 1990s,some social actors set up social movement organizations(SMOs)to bargain with the KMT authority through demonstrations and other means.A few years later,due to the interaction with the political parties of Taiwan,some SMOs started to imitate the conventional politics.At the same time,with many reconstruction projects occurring among the cities,the residents of some urban communities(shequ)were mobilized,the repertoires of community movements emphasized locality and heterogeneity.In 21st century,on one hand,some SMOs based social actors,such as Anti-nuclear movement,were gradually absorbed into the conventional politic system,become a part of the regular political machine reluctantly;on the other hand,youngsters in Taiwan formed a huge mobilization network covering whole Taiwan,which was connected by weak ties.With this network,young protesters were able to resisted the political parties'absorption.In their actions,in order to maintain the power of mobilization,young protesters formed their repertoires based on the "greatest common divisor" of the potential participants.Ultimately,the youngsters' repertoires demonstrated the characteristics of their generation.So,what factors led to the evolution of the repertoires of Taiwan's contentious politics?What are the constraints and mechanisms that people convert between different repertoires?In order to tackle the core problem,this study chose a macrostructure informed,mechanism based approach.With the empirical cases,we were able to mining the causal mechanisms of the evolution of contentious repertoires of Taiwan.We found that,with the transition of political structure,we could divided the evolution into four periods,in which the transition of the regime and its demobilization strategy against social movements have profoundly influenced the choices or innovations of Taiwanese social actors' contentious repertoires.For example,In late period of martial law,the compression political space force social actors had to rely on the existing network of interpersonal relationships,and instinctively transferred the traditional cultural factors into contentious repertoires.In the period of liberalization,the opening of political space enabled the social actors to set up formal SMOs,with which they were able to bargain rationally with the regime;but at this time,the harsh repression from KMT forced the SMOs to ally with the political opponents,which means Democratic Progressive Party(DPP).In the period of democratization,the transition of political structure influenced the contentious repertoires in two respects.First,the pressure of election not only forced KMT authority reducing the strength of repression,but also sabotage the alliance between social actors and DPP.Second,KMT authority created the "new national imagination" in this period,which led to the rise of the local consciousness of Taiwan society as well as a series of community movements with local identity tendencies.In the period of political party rotation,the DPP's ruling eventually led to the institutionalization of the anti-nuclear movement;and since 2008,the different cognitions of legitimacy between political and social actors shaped the repertoires of a series of student movements.To sum up,this study argues that,the transition of political structure,as well as the interaction between political and social actors,have an important shaping effect over the evolution of contentious repertoires of Taiwan.In short,the evolution of contentious repertoires of Taiwan is a "structured contingency":as the contentious repertoires evolving,the boundary of the evolution is constrained by the political structure,and the finally result is determined by the ongoing interaction between political and social actors.