Issue Orientation, Party System and Strategic Interaction from Two Cases1
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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. The author will extend the theoretical framework into large-N studies. Please don’t cite without the author’s permission. 2 Department of Political Science, National Taiwan University E-mail: [email protected]. “Sunflower Student Movement”, were lunched under the same political environment in Taiwan between 2013 and 2014. From the viewpoint of resource mobilization theory, the “Sunflower Student Movement” is superior to the “Whiteshirts Movement” in resource availability. However, the “Whiteshirts Movement” has successfully mandated the government to abolish martial court during peacetime but the “Sunflower Student Movement” failed to prevent the government from adopting the framework of Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement. After collecting data from four major newspapers in Taiwan, propaganda materials, speeches in demonstrations and official documents from SMOs, constructing some indicators for operationalizaiton, questionnaire surveys and deep interviews, the article finds polarized issues constructed by the “Sunflower Student Movement” split the whole population while concurrent issues appealed to cross-social groups in the “Whiteshirts Movement”. In addition, President Ma's government and KMT must respond to concurrent issues in contrast with only consolidating core supporters under polarized issues under single cabinet, unified government and majoritarian democracy. To sum up, issue orientation, party system and strategic interaction determines the success or failure of social movements in Taiwan. Future researches will focus on cross-national comparison to check theoretical “adaptability” and “restrictions” or extend the analytical framework into more distinct political environment. Keywords: social movements, policy outcomes, issue orientation, party system, strategic interaction I. Introduction There are some significant questions for researches on social movements. Some questions are why the movement broke out, as opposed to the other. Others have been centered on varying level of mobilization, the availability of resource and organizational structure. But then there are still other questions, for example, what account for the success or failure between different social movements. In fact, successful social movements have challenged the authority, reformed public policies, enhanced equal representation between genders and races, and established the mode of participatory democracy in the contemporary world. However, some social movements had limited success in terms of intended results. Therefore, how to find out key factors, which can differentiate successful and failed social movements, is the main goal in this article. Some promising theories have offered us to consider outcomes of social movements. One of these is resource mobilization theory (RM), the dominant paradigm shifting from social psychological approaches after 1960s. Despite regarding structured grievance as a constant factor, scholars have taken divergent viewpoints, arguing a long-term change in resource extraction, organizing facilities or the network of recruitment can instigate movements (Jenkins and Perrow, 1977; Oberschall, 1978; McCarthy and Zald, 1977; Tilly, 1978). Therefore, when some resources increase, such as discretionary time, financial supports, prominent leaders, endorsement by external organizations and the size of middle class, a high possibility of the movement appears (Cress and Snow, 1996; Jenkins, 1983; Khawaja, 1994; McCarthy and Zald, 1977). The other is political process model or political opportunity structure (POS), in which scholars have analyzed how political context, such as institutional design, power configuration and informal procedure, escalate or alleviate social conflicts (Eisinger, 1976; Kitschelt, 1986; Koopmans, 1990; Kriesi et. al., 1992;Tarrow, 1989). Therefore, social movements have cumbersome impacts on policy changes or play central role in decision-making by opening a window of political opportunity, with supporting evidences from variable outcomes of anti-nuclear movements (Kitschelt, 1986), new social movements in Western Europe (Kriesi et. al., 1992), counter-movements (Meyer and Staggenborg, 1996) or U.S. women’s suffrage movements between 1866 and 1919 (McCammon et. al., 2001).3 3 Both theories have confronted some problems. On the one hand, some studies have demonstrated the grievances, rather than a constant factor, which can be generated by sudden and major threats to the interests of cohesive and moderately resourceful groups (Jenkins, 1983: 531). Buecher (1993) also lists ten issues, which pose some significant challenges to RM, arguing importance of grievances through interactive dynamics, diffusion of ideology, more egalitarian form of organization, collective identity and culture. On the other hand, some explosively successful movements emerge like labor movements in the U.S. without open political opportunity structure (McCammon, 2001). Furthermore, causal However, both theories cannot explain the discrepancy between two major social movements based on civil disobedience, the “Whiteshirts Movement” (the death of Chung-chiu Hung) and the “Sunflower Student Movement” in Taiwan during 2013-2014. When it comes to resource derivation, organizational structure, the network of recruitment and leaderships, the “Sunflower Student Movement” is superior to the “Whiteshirts Movement”. The former also activated more mobilization to protest on Ketagalan Boulevard. However, the “Whiteshirts Movement” has successfully mandated the government to abolish martial court during peacetime but the “Sunflower Student Movement” failed to prevent the government from adopting the framework of Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement. Likewise, both movements occurred in the same political environment, and hence, some variables in POS cannot be applied. Therefore, the article analyzes why the discrepancy exists between two social movements. The article is divided into four parts. Firstly, I will review some relevant literatures and propose the theoretical framework. Secondly, the article reviews two major movements in Taiwan and makes three hypotheses. Thirdly, after interpreting research methods, that is, questionnaire survey, deep interviews and comparative approaches, the article tests three hypotheses derived from RM, POS and my theory. Different from weak hypotheses from RM, the article finds that polarized issues, which were constructed by the “Sunflower Student Movement”, split the whole population while concurrent issues appealed to cross-social groups in the “Whiteshirts Movement”. In addition, President Ma's government and KMT must respond to concurrent issues in contrast with only consolidating core supporters under polarized issues in two-party system. Therefore, issue orientation coupled with party system determines the success or failure of social movements in Taiwan. Finally, the interplay of political party based on votes-maximization strategy and social movement rooted in issue orientation offers future researchers to enlarge the underdeveloped field of this theory and focus on quantitative analysis to check theoretical “adaptability” and “restrictions”. II. Relevant Literatures and Theoretical Framework Resource mobilization theory (RM) RM theory examines mobilizations of a variety of resources, the linkage of social movements to external organizations and strategic interaction between the authority, competing camps and protestors themselves (Gamson, 1990; Jenkins and Perrow, mechanisms of POS, for example, what impedes, assist or irrelevant to some social movements