Author Description

Taiwan's populism movement features a bottom-up model in which autonomous civil society organizations cooperate to voice their opposition to the ruling elite. This movement has over time given rise to new political forces. In addition, this movement helps push forward several political reforms to level the playing field of political competition and increase civil participation in public policies. However, it also arouses some concerns about interfering with the function of representative democracy and technocratic governance. How this bottom-up model of populism affects the function of democracy is our main research question. Another unique feature of Taiwan's populism is that this movement in a large part stems from the fear of a close economic relationship between Taiwan and China and from questioning the authoritarian legacy of the KMT rule, such as its party assets. Protecting and strengthening democracy appear to be two important goals of the movement. We will ask how the nature of the movement affects the functioning of democracy. In this paper, we first identify who the populists in Taiwan in recent years are. We then discuss their issues and agendas and explore the demographics and socioeconomic backgrounds of the populists, including their leaders. Next, we will examine the sources of the movement and how these new parties fared in elections. Finally, we examine the positive and negative impacts of the populist movement on the functioning of democracy. In terms of research approaches, in addition to a detailed account of the movement, we will employ two surveys, the 2015 Democratic Governance survey conducted by the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy and the Fourth Wave Asian Barometer survey (hereafter ABS) conducted in 2015 to help us understand people's attitudes toward the movement. The first survey examines who is more likely to support the populist movement. The second examines how democratic values affect people's image of China and how this factor play