Your Democracy, Not Mine: The Rhetoric of Democracy in an Authoritarian Parliament

• In Event: Elites vs. the Public in Taiwan

Abstract

Studies of authoritarianism have highlighted the roles of nominally democratic institutions in authoritarian consolidation. However, the likelihood of democratic transition might be slim or large depending not only on the existence of these institutions, but also on how people within the institutions think about democracy. “Democracy” is not a term that has a constant and universally-agreed definition. Moreover, as widely recognized, even the most notorious dictators speak democracy, and authoritarian elites might highlight democracy and related words in order to strengthen the legitimacy of the regime. On the other hand, the opposition might promote democracy with a purpose of pushing forward regime changes. Accordingly, the term “democracy” may mean differently and be associated with diverse terms depending upon who speaks. Drawing on the transcripts of the interpellations from Taiwan’s parliament during the authoritarian era (1984-1992), this research probes the concept of democracy in the interpellations made by the members of parliament (MPs) from different groups across time. To be specific, I study four groups of the MPs, including those elected from the Mainland China, local Taiwanese elites leaning toward the government, the opposition soft-liners and the opposition hard-liners. I train a word embedding using the corpus where “democracy” appears for each group-year and examine what words are semantically similar to democracy for each particular group-year. Additionally, I perform semantic network analyses to further investigate how words are connected to democracy and how these connections vary across groups and time. Democracy might be more connected to Sun Yat-Sen’s thoughts and to the antagonism toward the communists for the Mainland-elected MPs, and it might be more associated to Taiwan’s social and economic developments for the local Taiwanese elites. However, democracy might be more associated with human rights, regime changes and Taiwan independence for the opposition MPs. This research contributes to the literature on authoritarian institutions by empirically examining the rhetorics of democracy seen in a nominally-democratic parliament. The findings also address long-lasting controversies over what we mean by democracy.

Author

• Isaac Shih-hao Huang, National Cheng Kung University