The Social Basis Of Party Politics In Taiwan

This thesis studies the relationship between social cleavage and the partysystem in Taiwan from the perspective of social cleavage theory. With acomprehensive view of party preferences of voters and the change of partiesstrength in elections, the paper found that the society cleavage in Taiwan hasundergone three major changes: the first stage is from the establishment of theDPP in1986to1993, the main society cleavage in Taiwan is the social conflictbetween authoritarian and democratic, and the provincial cleavage began toappear. In this context, Taiwan’s authoritarian one-party system collapsed andresulted in a competitive system; the second stage is from1993to2008,provincial cleavage began to evolve into reunification-"independence"differences, and become Taiwan’s major social differences. With this change,Taiwan’s party politics showing multi-party competition with two partiesdominated; since2008, the cleavage on social policy began to rise and promoteTaiwan toward the balanced two parties system.