On January 11, Taiwan held presidential and legislative elections. The incumbent president, Tsai Ing-wen, was reelected, and her party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) held onto its majority in the legislature. In the days before and shortly after the election I linked up with a group of fellow Taiwan-watchers to see how the candidates were campaigning and to better understand what the elections meant to Taiwan and the US.
On our first day we visited the DPP’s campaign headquarters. They set up an outdoor campaign venue with tents for playing, sharing ideas, and listening to lectures, and they also had this mock-up of the Taiwanese legislative chamber. My colleagues, from left: William Vocke (former head of Fulbright Taiwan), Thomas Shattuck (Foreign Policy Research Institute), Doug Fuller (City University Hong Kong), Carl Minzner (Fordham Law School & fellow Fulbrighter), Yours Truly, Jacques DeLisle (Penn Law School), Kharis Templeman (Stanford), Randall Nadeau (current head of Fulbright Taiwan), Maggie Lewis (Seaton Hall Law School), and Thomas Gold (UC Berkeley). Three others joined us later: Sara Newland (Smith College), Joe Wong (University of Toronto), and Pamela Kennedy (Stimson Center).
The Fulbright staff in Taiwan gave us fantastic help with organization and logistics. We all owe a big debt to Lisa Lin, Dalia Chang, Astin Chang, and Randall Nadeau.
Both campaigns were really trying to entice voters by making their campaigns feel fun and accessible. The DPP did a better job (the tents were a big hit with my group), but the KMT didn’t completely miss the mark.
Between the group’s arrival on January 8 and our final activity, a seminar on January 12, we visited:
- DPP headquarters
- DPP campaign headquarters
- the New Frontier Foundation
- the Taiwan Brain Trust
- the Institute of Political Science at Academia Sinica
- the Election Studies Center at National Chengchi University
- the Department of Political Science at National Taiwan University (my home department in Taipei — I managed to get lost and be really late for that one!)
- Taiwan People’s Party
- Taipei Forum (linked to the Han Kuo-yu campaign)
- KMT Youth League
- Taiwan FactCheck Center
- Taichung City Government
- Taiwan Statebuilding Party
- New Republic Foundation (reform-oriented KMT youth group)
- the Central Vote Counting Center
- a post-election workshop
We also attended a party in our honor (okay, in Maggie’s honor) and had lots of fun meals and other get-togethers.
Our closing activity was a post-election workshop sponsored by:
- Taiwan Foundation for Democracy
- Center for Strategic and International Studies
- Foreign Policy Research Institute
- Foundation for Scholarly Exchange/Fulbright Taiwan
- Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs
It was a fantastic, action-packed week, but one of the high points came before it even started. Maggie Lewis totally made my day (with a strong assist from my student/friend, Twitter maven Lincoln Davidson who passed it along to me) with this:
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