Compared with natural scientists, social scientists are ill equipped with hard-earned valid generalizations, not to mention any scientific laws. Struggling to construct their disciplinary identity, political scientists in these days borrow heavily from economics, such as rational choice and rent-seeking theories. Technically speaking, just as economists look faint in front of statisticians and mathematicians when exercising econometrics, political scientists have embarrassingly yet to prove their command in quantitative methods.
Watching on the sideline of the chaotic political jungle in Taiwan, I have gradually managed to discover one neat pattern without resorting to any sophisticated contemplation: Whenever there are disagreements over some issue, the final decision output tends to be the arithmetic mean. Simply add up the maximum and the minimum values on the spectrum and divide it by two. Let me give you some examples.
In the early 1990s, I was entrusted to monitor how legislators had diligently played their role of lawmaking. At one point, legislators disputed among themselves regarding the proper ceiling amount of inheritance left by Mainlander veterans to their offspring residing in China. On the one side, native Taiwanese legislators asserted that NT$ one million is enormously sufficient judging from the low living standard across the straits of Taiwan; on the other side, Mainlanders legislators insisted on three millions.
In expecting the coming total reshuffle of the parliament in forty years, a balance of two millions was hurriedly struck out without offering any rationale. Yes, no weights pertaining to numerical proportions of the ethnic groups were considered in the calculation.
Here comes another interesting case. To accommodate newly released local barons after the abolition of the so-called provincial assembly in 1997, national assemblymen set out to enlarge the size of the parliament from 164 to 225. Disregarding how the number 164 had initially been arrived at, one must be curious why this odd 225 was produced.
A friendly assemblyman naively solved the puzzled for me: Since the DPP demanded 250 seats while the KMT worked out that 200 were adequate, the obviously only compromise answer was 225. I must admit that the KMT was awfully generous not to demand any formula according to party strength.
In the early 1999, there were heated discussions on whether the rule of majority or plurality was to be employed in the coming presidential election in 2000. At one academic occasion, being invited to review a project paper on constitutional revisions, I accidentally caught a glimpse of the informal concordat between the quasi-representatives of the KMT and the DPP.
As the election was expected to be a triad tie, the KMT preferred absolute majority so that the still loyal James Soong would be forced to give up the play. Possessing roughly one-third of the vote, the DPP would rather retain simple plurality in order to avoid tactical voting by the supporters of Soong and Lien Chan. On the other hand, the DPP seemed to agree with the KMT that a weak president without a minimum 40% of the vote was vulnerable to the everlastingly undisciplined parliament.
If both parties had not failed in convincing, if not coercing, their national assemblymen to accept substantive constitutional issues in addition to their own extension of term, my educational guess of the abortive revision for the presidential electoral system would have been plurality with a 45% threshold!
Underlying these legislative, constitutional, and party undertakings is the undefined norm of asali (ªü²ï¤O), meaning unambiguously straight in the popular world, which the Taiwanese must have inherited from their ancestors as pirates who deemed swift and yet steadfast judgements imperative in their adventurously cruising in the oceans.
Chen Shue-bian is not blame for his recent centrism in presidential campaigns. In appearance, he seems to have asked for the loan from Tony Blair's much misread Third Way. Nonetheless, his transactional mindset is still coarsely cast by the above habitude, being ready to come to terms with whomever in his way to presidency.
Accordingly, Chen's recent pledge to allow for Chinese investment in Taiwan has not come about with surprise. While appeasing ambivalently to the Chinese, the DPP has to take national security into account. As a result, the centrist strategy would suggest the conditional approval of Chinese capitals.
However, by so doing, Chen is allowing for his agenda to be dragged by an unacceptable extreme pole lying beyond the domestic constituency.
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