The Effect on Constitutional Operation of Taiwan’s President as Party Chairperson

• Main Authors: Huang Wei-Ju, 黃微茹
• Other Authors: Su Tzu-Chiao
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/87731421389482614765

碩士 === 國立臺北大學 === 公共行政暨政策學系 === 104 === Since 1991, Taiwan’s constitution has been amended seven times and has brought significant change to Taiwan’s political system. Subsequently, the first party alternation in 2000 set an important milestone for Taiwan’s democratization. However, the issue ‘whether our president should take the leadership of the party’ becomes controversial. This debate causes scholars to discuss on our semi-presidentialism orientation. Therefore, the fundamental principle of constitution, such as “the Executive Yuan should be responsible to the Legislative Yuan”, and “the powers between the president and the president of the executive yuan” are frequently challenged by the issue “the president should take the leadership of the party”. Judging from this, the issue on〝whether the president should be the leader of the party〞is a topic which worths further discussion. In order to address this issue, this research takes “historical institutionalism” from neo-institutionalism as a research method and focuses primarily on the party-government relationship of semi-presidentialism since 2000. First, this research examines the development of Taiwan’s constitutional system and the historical trajectory of the process of change through the pattern of path dependency. What motivates President Chen and President Ma to be the leader of the party will next be discussed from the angle of “what the empirical perspective is”. Lastly, the issue will be discussed from “what the normative perspective is” and “what the empirical perspective is”, and whether the two viewpoints are contradictory will also be explored. This research found that after 1997, when the constitution was amended, under the structure of the constitutional system of semi-presidentialism, our president did not have the power to take charge of the meetings in executive yuan and; therefore, barriers between command of policies and decision-making existed. Since the tendency is to be taken for granted that the President should assume responsibility for the successes and failures of government policy, the President would like to occupy the position of leader of the party and to facilitate the relationship between the party and the government in order to enhance efficient policy implementation. Moreover, if the President takes the position of the leader of the party, he/she can directly control the entire party and be more effective in influencing the direction the party takes. Meanwhile, it forms a situation that the President can exercise sole control over both the executive and legislative powers simultaneously, thereby running the risk of destroying the precarious balance of the power between President and Parliament. This phenomenon illustrates the enormous contradiction between “what the normative perspective is” and “what the empirical perspective is” in the semi-presidentialism system; the former should emphasize the separation of powers between the President and the Parliament and suggests that the President shouldn’t take the position of the leader of the party when in fact the latter almost serves to destroy the separation of power in this development of the path dependency, which means that the President will be inevitably the leader of the party, he/she can manipulate his/her own party in order to become “Presidentialized Party” and cause the party surrender its autonomy. Thus, from all the above analysis, the writer found that the essence of the semi-presidentialism (especially those are presidentialism oriented) is a form of constitutional system with inherent contradictions.