The Impact of Democratization, Political Culture, and Diplomatic Isolation on Think Tank Development in Taiwan

Abstract

尽管台湾的智库部门跟大陆不无相似, 兴起于列宁主义一党制治下的国家主导的经济发展的时期，但今天却以一个既从事研究也进行倡导的重大力量而著称，这使得它们跟大陆的智库泾渭分明。我们追问的是台湾作为一个政治实体的进化，特别是它在渐进式政治自由化和至九十年代中期逐渐实现的充分民主化过程中的经历是如何塑造了智库的这种发展的。在此过程中，多党竞争、宗派主义以及活跃的公民社会和个体利益集团的兴起创造了一个使得智库服务被竞争的多方行动者争相需求的环境，为政策研究提供了广泛的资助机会。此外，强调专业知识的政治文化以及进行非官方的外交的需要也通常给予智库在系统内的优越地位，而它们在70年代起台湾因丧失国际外交承认而不得不进行的非正式外交活动中起到了关键机构的作用。我们还进一步对台湾的智库领域进行了概述，描述了研究机构所的主要群组（或类型）并且简要描述了其中特别突出的案例。最终，我们提供了两个详尽的案例研究，表明这些研究所是如何实际运作的，以及对非官方外交的需要以及最近一次的政府交替是怎样塑造了他们的活动的。

Taiwan’s landscape of think tanks – despite having emerged during a time of leninist one-party governance and state-led economic development not unlike that in mainland China – is today marked by a substantial agency in conducting both research and advocacy, which sets them apart from their counterparts on the mainland. We ask how this development was shaped by Taiwan’s evolution as a political entity, especially its experience of gradual political liberalization and eventual full democratization by the mid-1990s. In its wake, multiparty competition, factionalism, the emergence of a vigorous civil society and individual interest groups created an environment in which think tank services were sought by many competing actors, offering a wide array of funding opportunities for policy research. Additionally, a political culture that stresses expertise and the need to conduct unofficial diplomacy often gave think tanks a privileged position within the system, and they served as key agents in conducting the kind of informal diplomacy made necessary by Taiwan’s loss of diplomatic recognition from the 1970s onwards. We further offer an overview of Taiwan’s think tank landscape, describing major groups (or types) of institutes and briefly portraying especially prominent cases within them. Finally, we provide two detailed case studies to show how these institutes operate in practice, and how the need for unofficial diplomacy and a recent government change have shaped their activities.