Practicing Deliberative Democracy in Taiwan: Processes, Impacts and Challenges

Abstract

In 2000, the first power transfer between political parties in Taiwan’s history created a window of opportunity for institutional innovations. The rise of deliberative democracy in Western academia in the 1990s seemed to suit the new ruling party’s pursuit for legitimacy and good governance. Since 2002, academia and practitioners in Taiwan have experimented systematically with various deliberative mechanisms and have attempted to introduce them into Taiwan’s formal policy process. As a front-runner of new democracies in Asia and with a relatively open society, Taiwan’s experience in practicing deliberative democracy has referential value for democratic counterparts in Asia and other areas. In this essay, the authors use Taiwan as a case to illustrate how deliberative democratic mechanisms developed in this new democracy, and to explain both their influences on academia, the state, and society, and the challenges for the future. The authors also propose suggestions to address these challenges in order to incorporate deliberative democracy into the existing representative democratic system to improve the quality of democracy.