Issue Orientation, Party System and Strategic Interaction from Two Cases1
Policy Outcomes of Social Movements in Taiwan: Issue Orientation, Party System and Strategic Interaction from Two Cases1 Huang-ting Yan2 Abstract Some social movements have reformed public policies or established the mode of participatory democracy while others had limited success in terms of intended results. Although resource mobilization theory has been offered to explain impacts of social movements, the application in Taiwan is restricted. Therefore, how to find out key factors, which can differentiate policy outcomes of social movements, is the problematic in the article. Political context, which interacts with social environment, is vital to develop precise casual mechanisms underlying the theoretical framework. First of all, issue orientation that movement actors adopt can be divided into concurrent issues, consisting of supra-partisan, cross-sectors and generalized expectation, and polarized issues, which are defined as linkage to parties, centered on particular sectors and conflicting values. Secondly, due to votes-maximization strategy, governing parties must be alerted to concurrent issues, which represent far-reaching resentments from populations while they take indifferent attitude toward polarized issues, which symbolize angers only from oppositions. Therefore, issue orientation results in different impacts on social movements. Finally, the strategic interaction between government and opposition in policy making, which is affected by party systems, determines policy outcomes of social movements. Polarized issues should be successfully articulated under coalition government, divided government or consensus democracy because more “veto players” participates in the policy-negotiating and formulation phase. In order to test some hypotheses derived from the theoretical framework, the article compares two social movements, the “Whiteshirts Movement” and the 1 This is a draft, which mainly compares two social movements in Taiwan.
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