Local Governments and Electoral Clientelism in Taiwan

Abstract

While existing theories explain cross-national variation in clientelism using factors like development and democratic competition, they struggle to account for outliers like Taiwan - an advanced economy with consolidated democracy that continues to exhibit lingering clientelistic practices. To study the phenomenon, this dissertation proposes a novel explanation: subnational political centralization, and investigates the relationship between election levels and electoral clientelism (i.e. the exchange of exclusive material favors for electoral support) through multiple angles. In my first empirical study, I argue that abolishing local elections can reduce clientelism by removing both the incentives and capacity for local politicians to maintain patronage networks. Using Taiwan’s 2010 Municipal Reform as a natural experiment, I compare regions where local elections were abolished to those where they were not. Findings from surveys and field interviews suggest that centralization significantly reduces both the voters' perception of vote buying and politicians' capacity for vote buying over time. Besides, I deployed two conjoint experiments that simulate county magistrate and village chief elections in Taiwan to assess voters' tolerance for clientelism across different election levels. Although the general tolerance for clientelistic exchanges does not vary much across election levels, the subgroup analyses revealed that the variation of clientelism tolerance WITHIN different election levels involves divergent mechanisms. Particularly, the power mechanism is more applicable to village chief (lower local) elections, particularly for procurement projects and vote buying, while the closeness mechanism is more influential in county magistrate (higher local) elections across all types of clientelism. After all, this study contributes to the literature by highlighting election levels as a critical, underexplored dimension to understand the persistence of clientelism even in developed democracies.