New York and London: Routledge, 2021. 306 pp. (B&W photos.) US$49.00, ebook. ISBN 9781003127505.
In Taiwan’s Green Parties, Dafydd Fell traces the development of the Green Party of Taiwan (GPT) since its founding in 1996. Written along the tradition of Robert Michel’s classic book, Political Parties, and using data gathered from eight years of field research in Taiwan and excellent access to authoritative sources, Fell provides readers with a detailed account of the development of this small political party. In so doing, readers can appreciate and better understand the why’s and how’s of small party development in this young democracy of Taiwan.
The book is divided into six parts. In part 1, Fell goes through the justification of writing a book that focuses on a small Taiwanese political party and presents to the readers the research design and the nitty gritty details expected of proper political science research. This section, by and of itself, is important reading for young scholars-in-training as it tells us how the author grapples with the question: “How do we know what we know?” including the issues and challenges of doing proper research, collecting and analyzing data, and making proper inferences.
Much of the study of Taiwanese political parties has focused on the two major parties—the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)—but in so doing we are left unable to appreciate the plurality of interests that exists in Taiwanese democratic society. The choice of the GPT is apropos as it is one of the earliest third parties that was created following Taiwan’s full-fledged democratization. Of course, by the time the GPT registered itself as a political party, Taiwan already had 78 other parties. That said, by focusing on the GPT and its party development, the book provides a good understanding of a new issue mobilizer political party in Taiwan. This is fresh and something new to the study of Taiwanese political parties, and in my view, is one of the major contributions of this work.
In part 2, Fell provides an excellent background of the GPT and analysis of its electoral performance since its founding as well as its success in linking with the international Greens network. It is a solid examination of the challenges that small parties have to confront in terms of finance and name recognition, as well as mobilization of a new issue in the face of the dominant political cleavage: the unification-independence cleavage.
In parts 3 through 6, Fell follows the development of the GPT as it went through the leadership of various convenors. In these chapters, Fell not only fills the role of (unofficial) “party historian” par excellence but more importantly weaves into these historical narratives the significance of such developments to the continuing conversations with the comparative political parties literature and the research questions that he has set forth in part 1 of the book. In part 7, Fell provides a useful summary of the book and returns to tackle how the GPT and theories of comparative political parties fit.
The structure of the book is effective in helping Fell tackle the voluminous data on the GPT while weaving theory into the story of the GPT’s development throughout the nearly three decades since its founding. While Fell places the GPT in the family of movement political parties, unlike other studies of green parties in Western Europe (and particular the German Greens), there is less discussion of the struggles around the party’s primary goals, considering that it is quite typical in movement parties to balance the idealism of policy advocacy and the reality of needing to be electorally relevant. The work of Kaare Strom in the late 1980s would have enriched this study further, especially in the context of the competing party goals of office-seeking, vote-seeking, or policy-seeking. In this book, and unlike the ecological parties of Western Europe that also see themselves as movement parties, the reader is left with the impression that the GPT is primarily a vote-seeking party as there has been signficant discussion about its party performance in terms of the electoral dimension. In the meantime, Strom’s work and Harmel and Janda’s integrated theory of party change do acknowledge that these goals are not necessarily mutually exclusive; that is, the three party goals identified by Strom can all exist at the same time, and in Harmel and Janda’s perspective it is a question of which of the three party goals is primary, secondary, and tertiary in importance. Adding these discussions to the book would give us an even fuller picture of the GPT’s contribution to Taiwan’s party system and party politics.
At first glance, the case study of the Taiwan green parties seem to mainly contribute to the burgeoning literature on Taiwan democracy and politics and would only interest scholars of Taiwan politics. That, in my view, would be a superficial reading of the book and would have missed its true contributions, which are nomothetic rather than just the idiographic. The idiographic contribution, in this case the singular focus on Taiwan’s ecological parties, is an excellent and detailed historical account of the Green Party of Taiwan cannot be understated. Reading the book as a case study or area study, or even democratization work, gives readers a good account of Taiwan’s democratic polity.
The true value of Taiwan’s Green Parties is, in my opinion, the nomothetic contributions which are the conversations and dialogues the book is conducting alongside the comparative political parties literature. First, it contributes to the literature of comparative political parties—party development, institutionalization, and party change—and secondly, it contributes to the growing literature on ecological parties and what maybe more aptly termed as new politics mobilizing parties.
The book will be of interest to scholars of political parties, small parties, green ecological parties, Asian politics, and Taiwan politics in particular.
Alex Tan
University of Canterbury, Christchurch