ABSTRACT
Taiwan and South Korea have become widely recognized as two of the most successful third-wave democracies in East Asia. The Republic of China on Taiwan started its gradual democratic transition by first lifting martial law in 1987 and then holding its first truly democratic parliamentary election in 1992 and the first popular election for the president in 1996. Since then, the island’s young democracy has held free, regular and competitive elections to choose the heads of the executive branches and the members of the legislatures at all levels of government. Moreover, Taiwan has in the recent two decades peacefully undergone three power rotations (in 2000, 2008 and 2016) between the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). In addition, the DPP has won the majority in Legislative Yuan for the first time in 2016. So in terms of Samuel Huntington’s (1991) “two-turnover test,” Taiwan’s nascent democracy passed this simple litmus test of democratic consolidation in 2008.
