Re-examination of the Semi-presidential System in Taiwan: The Perspectives of Old and New Institutionalism
Author: Jenq-rong Shyu, Chun-hao Chang
Abstract / Chinese PDF Download
Since the 1997 constitutional amendments stipulated the “semi-presidential”system in Taiwan, this new constitutional system has raised lots of discussions inboth normative and operative dimensions. As time goes by, with the first regimeturnover, more and more constitutional problems have emerged. Actually, there aremany researches on Taiwan’s constitutional system. Besides the approach of “oldinstitutionalism”, recently, the researchers also make use of the “newinstitutionalism” approach to argue how constitution changes in Taiwan. However,the old and new institutionalism are historically and methodobogically, derivedfrom the same origin, while the concepts of “constitution” and“constitutionalismcan” can also relate to either of then. Therefore, from thecomparative viewpoint of old and new institutionalism, this paper will analyze threemain problems of Taiwan’s constitutional operations revealed by the president-premier-Legislative Yuan interactions in theree dimensions, i.e., constitution,constitutional operation and the spirit of constitutionalism. The purpose of thispaper is to establish a new analytical framework which can specify constitutionalproblems effectively, and suggest the solutions too.