國立臺灣大學政治科學論叢

Abstract / Chinese PDF Download

The party negotiation mechanism has been a pivotal legislative procedure of the Legislative Yuan in Taiwan, and it has come to be regarded as a mechanism for improving legislative efficiency and resolving impasses between the ruling party and the opposition party. Due to the specialty of the party negotiation mechanism in legislative studies, there are few related theories and most research is limited by incomplete data. However, the situation had changed with the 9th Legislative Yuan in which the meeting minutes of the party negotiation mechanism had been opened to the public for the first time. Moreover, the political structure of Legislative Yuan changed drastically – the DPP won a legislative majority for the first time, allowing the party to appoint the legislative president – a position which had always been held by KMT legislators in the past. The questions this article aims to answer are: With the radical changes in the political structure of the legislative environment, did any formal or informal institutional transformations occur? What level of institutionalization has been achieved? What is the motivation for the caucus to modify the committee’s resolutions? This article compares the legislative initiatives of the 8th and 9th Legislative Yuan, and analyzes the contents and results of bills and records of committee meetings, which act as the units of analysis in order to examine the influence of the party negotiation mechanism. We also utilize in-depth interviews with caucus leaders and committee conveners to understand the actual operation of the negotiations. In general, our findings show that the 9th Legislative Yuan was much more institutionalized than the 8th, that up to 90% of the bills had been successfully enacted, meaning that there was no longer a phenomenon of high rates of bills being defaulted during negotiations, as they had been in the past. Furthermore, the president of the Legislative Yuan who used to be very influential to the results of negotiations has changed into a role that doesn’t intervene in the disputes but only focuses on the procedure. With the lack of the president’s mediation, the breakdown of the negotiation can only move to roll call votes. This change is apparently favorable to the ruling party. With regards to the motivation of the caucus, bills of ideological confrontation and party competition likely end in negotiation deadlocks, while bills of cognitive divergence mostly finish with content modification.