Taiwan's legislative scholars rarely investigate congressional speech. Congressional speech is legally defined as legislative behavior, just as much as roll call vote. I attempt to look into congressional speech and investigate three targets of it- party, constituency, and information. Previous literature that deals with congressional speech targets start from one major question: does the majority caucus in Legislative Yuan help its members to engage in distributional lawmaking? In answering this question, there are two competing schools of thought. The first is Maltzman's ＂conditional model,＂ and the second is Cox and McCubbins' ＂party government model.＂ The two models prescribe two competing hypotheses, respectively. I found that Cox and McCubbins' model is correct regarding the association between the majority party strength and the pro-earmark speech. As far as the research design, I collected the legislative reports of the seventh Legislative Yuan, which includes eight sessions. These reports cover the information on many legislative speeches held by individual legislators. The dependent variable is the purposes of each of these speeches, and the independent variables include the majority party strength, issue salience and many others. This paper is by far the most complete investigation of congressional speech in Taiwan's lawmaking literature. It is also the first paper in Chinese that deals with the theoretical debate between Maltzman and Cox and McCubbins regarding their views on the interaction of the party, constituency, and information in congressional committees.
Current Issue
Volume #24, Number #1
Published in June, 2020
From the perspective of political inclusiveness and accountability, how to ensure the adequate participation of women in public affairs and include their interests in the legislative process are important issues in contemporary democracies. Many countries have also tried to increase female representation in politics via various institutional arrangements. Under the global trend toward gender equality, Indonesia has undergone several legal reforms to raise the proportion of female candidates in the People's Representative Council (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat, DPR) elections in the post- Suharto era. Using data covering the period from 1998 to the 2019 general elections, this paper intends to examine the participation of women as candidates and as elected representatives in the DPR elections, to highlight the candidacy barriers impeding the entry of women into politics, and to discuss the role of electoral systems as a means of increasing women's political representation in Indonesia. Unlike the traditional theory that the open-list PR will lead to intraparty competition and disadvantage female candidates, in Indonesia within the context of small district magnitude and multi-party competition, open-list PR gives female candidates who are not at the front of the party list a chance to be elected.
As in Taiwan today, direct democratic institutions were also present during the Weimar Republic and enshrined in the Constitution. Similar to the founders of Taiwan's constitution, the founders of the Weimar Constitution brought direct democratic elements into the Weimar Constitution mainly because they lacked confidence in the parliament and thought direct democratic elements could complement the representative system or act as a measure of checks and balances against the parliament. The German jurist Carl Schmitt has not only analyzed the legitimacy of parliamentarism, but has also provided a critique on direct democratic elements in the Weimar Constitution: the elements of direct democracy challenged parliamentarism and indirectly caused the collapse of the Weimar Republic. While Schmitt's theoretical account of representative and direct democracy was widely adopted in the postwar period, his influence remains underestimated. Therefore, this article will first introduce the direct democratic elements in Weimar Germany and then move on to Schmitt's analysis of the tension between representative and direct democracy. Lastly, based on Schmitt's thought, this article will also reflect on the limitations and weaknesses of direct democracy.
This research aims to investigate whether disaster response systems have the foundations needed to self-organize and overcome the uncertainties present in post-disaster environments. Drawing upon contributions from the resilience, network governance, and complex adaptive systems literature, this article presents the findings of an investigation into the disaster response system that operated in Indonesia after the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake and Tsunami. Network data, comprised of organizational actors and their interactions, were collected from newspaper articles and situation reports published between 26 December 2004 and 17 January 2005. These data were transformed into a series of twenty-two relational matrices and processed with network analysis software. Three network measures, namely, density, diameter and components, were computed and plotted by date to evaluate the development and structural evolution of the tsunami response system. The findings indicate that the disaster response system experienced structural change. While additional research is needed to validate these findings, future research should explore the mechanisms that drive self-organization in post-disaster environments, as well as the steps policy-makers can take to design and promote self-organizing disaster response systems.
The idea of crowdfunding has rapidly gained momentum around the world, as ordinary people have been looking for solutions to compensate for the diminishing interest rates on their investments in bonds and bank savings deposits as a result of the financial crisis in 2008-2009. The authorities have long remained inactive, but due to the rapid growth in popularity of crowdfunding, they have slowly introduced or modified regulations. The regulatory authorities have had to identify the interests of stakeholders to facilitate access to micro and small capital, as well as to create a system for platforms serving as intermediaries between fund receivers and providers, while at the same time protecting individual investors against total loss. This research seeks to find and analyze key reasons for the importance of retail funding in Singapore and South Korea as the two countries share a similar historic and economic background in the post-World War II era. It also examines whether and to what extent the regulatory framework in these two countries is patterned upon the framework created in more developed and experienced countries. It focuses on securitized, that is, equity-based and lending-based, crowdfunding and intends to analyze the development and application of crowdfunding regulations in Singapore, which opted for a modification of existing regulations, and South Korea, which opted for an explicit regulation. The study then seeks to identify the main similarities and differences between these two countries in the context of crowdfunding regulations. Finally, it endeavors to answer the question of whether crowdfunding may become a potential source of funding for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in these two countries, with a particular focus on startups devoid of the financial resources needed for growth and for the commercialization of new products and services.