Unlimited Competition And Limited Competition: A Comparison Of Institutional Changes In Taiwan And Singapore

The modern political party started to form since the 17 th century, the change of party system has become one of the important researches of political science. This paper chooses the party system of Taiwan and Singapore in 1980 s and 1990 s as the object of research. It is mainly based on the fact that Taiwan and Singapore have the same or similar initial conditions, such as the cultural background, level of economic development and so on. However, they eventually take a different path of change of party system. Therefore, this paper tries to use the research methods of historical institutionalism to analyze reasons of the phenomena and to compare the similarities and differences between the changes of two party systems.Firstly, this paper uses the classification of party system of Sartori to define the party system of Taiwan and Singapore in 1980 s and 1990 s. They both belonged the non-competitive party system. But after that, the party system of Taiwan gradually changed the two-party system of unlimited competition, and the party system of Singapore evolved the dominant party system of limited competition. Secondly, we use the theory of historical institutionalism to analyze the historical process of party system of Taiwan and Singapore, such as the key nodes, path dependence and evolution of system’s function. Thirdly, this paper chooses four key variables and their interactive relationship, such as external challenges, internal shocks, new ideas and the role of the elite, to analyze the reason that the two party systems produce different results. Thus, we obtain the similarities and differences of party system change of Taiwan and Singapore. Specifically, on the one hand, the same things include five aspects, such as conflict of the two values, rising pluralistic society, the increasingly powerful opposition parties, the reform of ruling party’s initiative and the party system from non-competition to competition. On another hand, the differences are also reflected in the following four points, namely the different intensity of values integration, the different complexity of social and political, the different living space of the opposition parties and the different political choices of the ruling elites.Therefore, from the different paths and results of party system change of Taiwan and Singapore, we can conclude some kinds of regularity knowledge of the developing countries(regions), that is, the optimum result of party system change is from non-competition to limited competition, and the party system change should accord the countries’ history, culture and actual situation.