Democratic Deficit in Taiwan? A Longitudinal Study of Corruption Perception

• In Event: Public Opinion Research in Taiwan: Old Topics and New Angles

Abstract

The central government in Taiwan was controlled by the Kuomintang (KMT) for more than 50 years, until the first party alternation occurred in 2000. This peaceful transformation from single-party authoritarianism to multiparty democracy has been considered one of the best cases among the third-wave democratization. Among many things, people in Taiwan would expect this best-case creates a clean government and the democracy breeds integrity. This expectation, however, might not be confirmed. Previous research has indicated that democracy is not necessarily an antidote to corruption. A casual observation of the past three party alternations in Taiwan is likely to be in congruence with the previous research. Indeed, a democratic deficit seems to occur when the corruption perception of central governments falls short of people’s expectations. The purpose of this paper is to examine systematically whether a democratic deficit has occurred in Taiwan by conducting a longitudinal study of corruption perception of central governments from 1996 to 2018. This paper will use corruption measurement data from various sources, including the official statistics, the salient issues reported by the media, the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) by Transparency International (TI), and most importantly, the Taiwan Integrity Survey (TIS). The TIS is a longitudinal research project initiated by the Ministry of Justice in 1997. Up until now, 25 nationwide surveys have been conducted to investigate the public perception of corruption in Taiwan. By integrating and analyzing data from various sources, this paper expects to make theoretical contributions on the study of democratic deficit and corruption perception.

Author

• Chilik Yu, Shih Hsin University