The second proposition, as mentioned before, emphasizes that the political environment should play a key role in understanding the role change of the Legislature. It further proposed that in a period of hard authoritarianism, a legislature may behave like a sleeping lion; in a period of soft authoritarianism, a legislature may be awakened; in a period of rapid democratization, it would roar; in a period of democratic consolidation, it may still roar but not that loudly.
In the case of Taiwan, four periods of democratization have been identified by the change in institutional arrangements, which mainly influenced the inner environment of the Legislative
founding members of the DPP in 1986.
77 Please see Appendix D marked with an X sign.
78 There were eleven new members added to the Yuan in the year of 1969. Since their numbers only occupied about 2.5% of the total seats, and they did not need to be reelected for a three-year term, they are treated as those elected in 1948 elected, Please also see Appendix E.
79 Since the three newspapers have kept complete records dating back to the year of 1951, this study then coded them starting from that year.
Yuan.80 Furthermore, the outer environment of the Yuan, as shown on Table 2, also demonstrates its having undergone significant change at the different periods of democratization in Taiwan.
Thirdly, that a sleeping-lion like the Legislative Yuan, not a rubber stamp, should have appeared during the period of hard authoritarianism in Taiwan has been discussed in the examination of the first proposition. Then how did the Legislative Yuan perform in the next three periods? Tables 3 to 5 separately show the statistics on the legislators’ oral questions at the Yuan sessions at the three different periods.
【Tables 3 to 5 about here】
Taking Tables 1 with 3 to 5 together, one finds that the total in the frequency of oral
questions raised by legislators in the Yuan sessions differs from period to period quite amazingly.
The average frequency per year for the period from 1950 to 1972 is 160.8 times; for that of 1972 to 1986 it is 277.3; then 1033 in the period from 1987 to 1991, and 1578.2 in the last period (1993 to 2000). If only counting the frequency of oral questions involving democracy issues, the differences among the four periods are still very impressive. The average frequency of those per year are respectively 9, 65, 274, and 149 for each period.81 These rough estimations of
legislators’ articulations in different periods seems to primarily confirm that the role of the Legislative Yuan has been undergoing change at Taiwan’s various stages of democratization. It looks like the Legislative Yuan was quite sleepy and quiet in the first period, gradually awakening in the second; then suddenly becoming very active in the third period of rapid democratization, and still active but paying more attention to some things other than democracy issues in the fourth period.
Nevertheless, the second proposition also concerns the corresponding relationship between change in the political environment and the role change of the legislature. It hypothesizes that an awakening lion legislature should be more alert to the change in the environment than a sleeping one, Moreover, a roaring lion then should not only reflect changes in environment, but also try to bring about the changes. Has the role change of Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan during the
democratization process fitted into these two hypotheses?
The paper first correlates the total frequency with which issues were raised by legislators in each of the six main democratic categories each year with that of reports by the newspapers in the same years for each period. The correlation Pearson r between the two for each period is shown on Table 6. The period from 1972 to 1986 appeared to have a better positive correlation between the two than that in the first period (0.195 vs. 0.631). The Legislative Yuan looked really more awakened in this period than in the first.
【Table 6 about here】
80 Please see Section B, Conceptual Operationalization and Data Collection in Part III of this paper.
81 Please see the bold columns separately marked on Tables 1, 3, 4, and 5.
The third one, the period of rapid democratization, then solely had a negative correlation between the two (-0.267). It seems that the Legislative Yuan really tried to run counter to the focus of the newspapers. That is, when the newspapers had been paying less attention to the six main democratic issues throughout this period, the Legislative Yuan, on the contrary, had gradually increased its articulations on these issues (see Tables 2 and 4). Whether it had set its own agenda on the issues during this period will be further examined.
The problem may be the fourth one, the period of democratic consolidation, where the correlation between the frequency of the six main democracy issues reported by the newspapers and of that raised by legislators during the same period is 0.903. This is the only one of the four periods that reached the significant level of P<0.05 and confirms the correlative relationship existing between the newspapers’ reports and the questions raised by legislators.
However, since the third period has shown a negative number (-0.267) for this relationship, this significant positive correlation (0.9) for the fourth period looks closer to that of the second one, but very different from that of the third period, given the proposition that the Legislative Yuan was hypothesized to behave like a roaring lion for both the third and the fourth period. Then had the lion not roared but almost fallen asleep, so as to resemble an awakening one in the
democratic consolidation period?
【Table 7 about here】
Table 7 tries to make clear the plausible corresponding relationship between the role of the legislature and the environment from an agenda-setting angle. It presents a ranking by frequency of the six main democracy issues mentioned by both the newspapers and Legislators’ oral questions at different periods. It is interesting to note that the most pronounced difference happened between the second and the fourth period as seen in Table 7. The ranking of the six democracy issues that appeared in the newspapers in the fourth period is exactly identical with that of legislators’ oral questions, thus the difference in ranking betweens the two is zero for this period. On the other hand, the second period showed the largest discrepancy in the ranking of the two data collection systems. There is not a single identical pair in the six main democracy issue categories between the newspaper side and the legislator side. The total ranking difference between the two in this period is twelve.
It would be safe to say that the Legislative Yuan in the fourth period of democratic consolidation did not behave like it was just awakening as it did in the second period. On the other hand, its role in the second period, though that of one awakened by the total democratic claims made by the environment, was not able to bring out the importance of each issue, or to echo the specific demands of the environment. On the other hand, the Legislative Yuan seemed to be able to echo the environmental voices with greater sophistication in the third and fourth period than before. However, a roaring lion, cannot just echo but has to lead, sometimes.
The Legislative Yuan’s role in Taiwan’s period of rapid democratization (1987-1991), as mentioned above, has shown itself to be opposite from that of the newspapers in bringing to the fore democratic issues. From a detailed examination of the frequency of the six democracy issue
categories articulated by legislators each year during this period, one distinctive issue may be singled out. It is the issue of the retirement of central government representatives. If one compares the frequency of articulations on this issue during this period with that of the newspapers (Table 2), the agenda setting function of the Legislative Yuan seems to emerge.
Table 4 shows that the legislators had articulated most on this issue category among the six in the year of 1987(40 times). In the same year, among the newspapers this issue was ranked third, next to the freedom issue, and the human rights issue. The reporting frequency was far below number one (344/1314) and quite close to the fourth Martial Law issue (341, see Table 2).
However, in 1988 the newspapers also paid a great deal attention to this issue. Their frequency of reporting on this issue, though ranked second, dramatically increased to 764, only 118 times below the number of times for the issue of freedom (764/882, see Table 2). This frequency also enlarged the gap between this issue and the retirement issue and other issues.82 The Legislative Yuan, on the other hand, moved on to articulate some other democratic issues, though still paying attention to this one in 1988 (see Table 4).
In the period from 1992 to 2000 defined as the period of democratic consolidation, most of the main democracy issues were addressed in new legislation,83 so what was left for the
Legislative Yuan to roar about, or play a role in on setting an agenda? Here one has to admit that hard evidence for this is difficult to offer from the current data. Since all democracy related issues, which could not be categorized into the six main themes fell into the category of “others”, there were no specific items to further mark the differences among these issues. Thus if both the legislators and the newspapers brought up some democracy issues which were categorized this way, there is no way for the author to tell the plausible leading relationship between the two on a certain democracy issue. Nevertheless, the category of “others” is still able to indicate the shifting attention of the two systems as well as compare the discrepancy between the two, which may offer a clue to understanding the role change of the Legislative Yuan in a period of democratic consolidation. Table 8 shows this comparison.
【Table 8 about here】
Table 8 indicates that the democracy issue agendas for the newspapers and the Legislative Yuan, indeed, were quite different from each other judging by the category of “others” for both the third and the fourth period. The newspapers paid about 17% less attention to other issues related to democratic improvement than the Legislative Yuan did in both periods.
As to the other two periods, the Legislative Yuan in the second one, as it was supposed to be awakening, also paid a similar amount of attention to other democracy related issues as that of the environment (41% vs. 43%). In the first period, the Legislative Yuan was not expected to echo the demands of the environment. It did not according to various records offered before, but the
82 See Table 2, the human rights issue ranked third in this year, but its reporting frequency was 486, 278 instance fewer than those of the retirement issue.
83 See Appendix E.
discrepancy between its attention to other democracy issues and that of the newspapers was similar to that in the second period (45% vs. 47%).
In sum, the role change of the Legislative Yuan corresponded to the change in environment of the Yuan. As the propositions expected, the Legislative Yuan behaved like a sleeping lion in Taiwan’s period of hard authoritarianism (1950-1972). It was not awakened until both its internal environment had been changed by having some regularly elected supplementary legislators and its external environment had also raised more democracy issues than it did before the period from 1972 to 1986. It had tried to echo the demands of the environment, but had only achieved this in a very rough way, not being able to closely respond to the specific democracy issues emerging from the environment. Then the Legislative Yuan did behave like a roaring lion in both the period of rapid democratization and that of democratic consolidation, because it was not only able to echo more clearly, but also to lead or to set issue agendas for the environment. The roaring lion, the Legislative Yuan, was louder and fiercer in the third than in the fourth period.