Cleavage structure and the demise of a dominant party: The role of national identity in the fall of the KMT in Taiwan

Abstract

The KMT’s electoral defeat in 2016 was not a case of a dominant party crashing to defeat due to mismanaging its factions or ineptly allocating state resources. This article illustrates a third path by which dominant parties can lose power. The KMT lost because the underlying cleavage structure slowly shifted and eroded the KMT’s political foundations over a quarter century. Indeed, the KMT had ceased to be a dominant party long before 2016; that election was merely a particularly dramatic step in what was actually a long decline. Taiwan has a single dominant political cleavage defined by national identity. Since the early 1990s, exclusive Taiwanese identity has gradually increased and eventually replaced both Taiwanese and Chinese identity as the majority disposition. As the cleavage line gradually shifted, the KMT tried to develop other appeals, but these were only successful as long as they did not directly clash with the dominant national identity cleavage.