May 14th is National Assembly election day in Taiwan – it’s a single issue election, with constitutional reform the only topic. A couple of months ago the election was looking like a formality, with all four major political parties supporting the proposed reforms. Now, however, things are looking different – as two of the four parties have changed their minds.

Although this issue has got little press recently (and none internationally), it is likely to have a far greater long-term effect than any trips to China by Lien Chan or James Soong.

Constitutional Reform

Back in August last year, the legislature unanimously agreed a set of reforms to the constitution of the Republic of China (Taiwan’s official name). The main proposals were:

• To halve the size of the Legislature
• To alter the election process for the Legislature
• To disband the National Assembly
• To allow all future constitutional changes via referenda

Reforming the legislature

The biggest problem with democracy in Taiwan at the moment are the politicians who get elected to the legislature. There are several reasons for this, but a major reason is the election process – which makes election of extremists much more likely than other systems. There are only a small number of voting districts, with each of them returning several legislators; so for example in the Taoyuan district there were 28 politicians competing for 11 positions – this meant that it was possible to get elected with just over 4% of the vote! In this sort of environment, a winning strategy is to do anything to get in the news, and hope that 90% of people think you’re an idiot, but 10% think you’re clever and worth voting for.

The result: candidates who get into fights, take up extreme positions (not just on unification/independence) and don’t care what the majority think. This needs to change.

The proposed constitutional change will improve things immeasurably, by bringing Taiwan into line with most Western nations. It will be a “single district, dual vote” system, with one vote for a legislator and the other vote for a party. Each district elects only one candidate, and a set of seats are reserved for parties on a proportional basis. The number of legislators will also be halved – hopefully bringing up the average quality, and a single term will be increased from 3 to 4 years.

Abolishing the National Assembly

The second part of reform is to abolish the National Assembly. This used to be the most powerful body in the ROC political system (there’s a good description here), but it has been gradually losing power (to the Legislature and the President) ever since the KMT retreated to Taiwan in 1949. Members used to represent each province of China – which made reelection of 95% of the members somewhat problematic while the ‘Communist rebels’ controlled the mainland; this meant the original members stayed in their posts until they died of old age (which started to happen with some regularity in the 70s and 80s). Clearly this is now a remnant of a previous era, and it deserves to be finally scrapped.

The only power that remains in the National Assembly is to be responsible for any change to the Consitution. The proposed change will make this a function jointly of the Legislature (to propose and agree any change) and a referendum of the people (to enact the change).

However, the National Assembly needs to be convened one last time to make these proposed changes to the constitution.

This is all background to the National Assembly elections; I will describe the actual election in a follow up post.