CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2019
| Author | Yu, Ruichuan |
|---|---|
| Title | Why Does a Government Make Referendums Easier for the Opposition? A Hypothesis-Generating Case Study of Taiwan |
| Summary | Referendums are more frequently used as an indispensable policy-decision mechanism in democracies. There is a trend of the increasing use of the referendum among the new democracies since the third wave of democratization, while less attention has been paid to the institutional changes of referendums. Most democracies tend to maintain restrictive provision to make the referendum less accessible to the public. Lowering the referendum thresholds rarely happens among the new democracies, especially without the purpose of power abuse. Taiwan seems to be the only case among the new democracies in which the winning party lowered referendum thresholds, not for power abuse. This thesis focuses on the question of why a political party in a new democracy would like to promise to lower the referendum thresholds during the election campaign and fulfill this promise after winning the election. Since there is a lack of literature specifically on the political party’s lowering the referendum thresholds, this thesis generates four hypotheses to explain this question above based on the case study of Taiwan. This thesis starts with an introduction to the case of Taiwan and the core questions this thesis is going to answer. In chapter 2, I clarify the definition of the term “referendum” in this thesis and discuss the types of referendum thresholds and why thresholds matter. In chapter 3, I analyze the existing literature with a focus on parties’ motivation of selecting issues and fulfilling promised ahead and after the election. In this chapter, an overview of relations between the referendum thresholds and the political party is briefly introduced due to the limited existing literature. In chapter 4, I contextualize the case of Taiwan by analyzing the multiple-dimension external conditions. Besides, I generate four hypotheses to explain why the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in Taiwan proposed the issue of the referendum reform and made a promises to lower the referendum thresholds during the election campaign, and why the DPP moderately fulfilled its commitments despite the risk that the fulfillment of this promise would hurt its governance. In chapter 5, I discuss the impacts and consequences of lowering the referendum thresholds and try to summarize the necessary and sufficient conditions under which lowering referendum thresholds could happen in other democracies. In chapter 6, I conclude by a summary of generated hypotheses and further research ideas. |
| Supervisor | Matthijs Bogaards |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/yu_ruichuan.pdf |
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