Abstract
The story of Asian economic development and its political consequences in the long postwar era has been told many times, but rarely has the tale been woven around political legitimacy. Taiwan, and for that matter South Korea—the other widely cited newly industrialized economy and young democracy—modernized according to a series of well-sequenced national projects: a successful agrarian reform that laid the ground for rapid and sustained export-led industrialization under a developmental authoritarian regime within a liberal capitalist international order; in due course the rise of new middle class that pushed for democratic change, to which the regime, shored by strong economic credentials, responded positively; leading, upon democratization, to a shift of focus to an affordable social policy that drew warning lessons from the overdeveloped welfare states in some European nations.1 Yet this benign pattern of transformation can also be analyzed in terms of changing legitimacy formulae. Till its recent democratization, Taiwan had been under Nationalist (Kuomintang or KMT) authoritarian rule for around four decades. Although it initially faced no formidable challenge to its rule, the regime undertook a long search for a new legitimacy basis to justify its continuing monopolization of political power.
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© 2011 John Kane, Hui-Chieh Loy, and Haig Patapan
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Wu, N., Cheng, Tj. (2011). Democratization as a Legitimacy Formula: The KMT and Political Change in Taiwan. In: Kane, J., Loy, HC., Patapan, H. (eds) Political Legitimacy in Asia. Palgrave Series on Asian Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137001474_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137001474_12
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