Hands Off: Legislative Violence in Taiwan and its Possible Cultural and Institutional Influences

• In Event: Forms of Physical Protest in East Asian Parliaments

Abstract

Although physical violence seems intuitively inappropriate in any parliamentary setting, instances of legislative violence can be found in many countries. Taiwan’s track record nevertheless seems to stand out in terms of their frequency. For the most part, such brawls were not noticeable for their actual level of violence, but rather for their almost theatrical quality, which reminds some observers of the ritual fighting employed in local feuds, a ubiquitous feature of Taiwan’s local history. The question is therefore whether violent forms of political debate are rooted in local political culture, or whether other causes are responsible. So far, institutional changes don’t seem to have had a mitigating influence on legislative violence, since it seems to endure despite far-reaching reforms in the formal political institutions since the 1980s, marking it out as a persistent trait of Taiwan’s vibrant parliamentary culture.
After collecting the most notable incidents of legislative violence in Taiwan and analyzing them in terms of types of violence employed, characteristics of active participants, issues fought over, and repercussions after the fact, using video and photographic evidence as well as news reports, another part of the research will focus on the public perception of such fights, including the language used to describe them. Finally, possible institutional and cultural influences will be evaluated and discussed with a view to drawing comparisons with examples from other countries (especially South Korea and Japan) to provide a basis for cross-cultural comparisons.

Author

• Sarah Kirchberger, University of Hamburg