Between Compliance and Revolt: Popular Contention and Authoritarian Legitimacy in 1980s Taiwan

• In Event: 50460 - Section on Comparative-Historical Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 5: Contentious Politics

Abstract

Popular contentions are often viewed as threats to authoritarian regimes, with the assumption that increasing collective actions naturally lead to political demands for regime change. This perspective neglects that authoritarian regimes survive not through repression alone but usually legitimize coercive power through public welfare provision and the accommodation of grievances. This paper distinguishes between rightful resistance, which operates within the framework of authoritarian legitimacy, and ideologically driven anti-regime movements, examining their interactions and consequences in the case of Taiwan’s democratic transition. Drawing on unpublished National Security Bureau archives on Taiwan’s social movements, I analyze grassroots welfare contention within the power struggle between two opposition factions with distinct orientations toward regime legitimacy. Loyalists appealing to the promised constitutional rights sought electoral competitiveness through patron-clientelism, while pro-independence subversives weaponized grievances to challenge the regime’s foundation. A critical conjuncture analysis of the 1988 farmer protests reveals that welfare grievances did not automatically escalate into anti-regime movements, nor did subversive actors successfully transform welfare contention networks into revolutionary resources. This failure of social movement’s politicalization stemmed not from mobilization deficiencies but from the authoritarian ability to neutralize the social foundation for subversion by redressing farmers’ grievances. The strong authoritarian legitimation lowered down the opposition’s expectation of subversion. However, by drawing the opposition into the regime’s constitutional framework, it paradoxically provided a platform for intensified political contestation through electoral patron-clientelism. These findings challenge the repression-resistance paradigm in the study of state-society relations under authoritarianism, foregrounding the fluid and negotiated nature of political participation in non-democratic contexts. At the same time, they highlight how collective action can strategically leverage authoritarian legitimation discourse as a resource to expand political participation from within, a dynamic that warrants further attention in explaining authoritarian-led democratization.

Authors

• Delin Zhang, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

• Wenkai He, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology