Popular Contentions within and without the Authoritarian Legitimacy: The Case of Taiwan in the 1980s

Delin ZHANG, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

This paper re-examines the dynamics of popular contention by re-centering the analytical process on authoritarian state legitimation. Alfred Stepan’s question about bridging the gap between civil collective actions and political opposition is central to democratization but often overlooked due to the narrow focus on mobilization in political sociology. Contrary to the conventional repression-resistance framework, I highlight the importance to distinguish popular contentions within and without the authoritarian legitimacy and their divergent consequences on authoritarian rule. Authoritarian regimes must legitimize their power by providing governance that citizens genuinely value. Consequently, the credibility of revolutionary threats posed by popular contentions depends on the regime's responsiveness. An authoritarian state with robust performance legitimation addresses the grievances of ordinary citizens with respect to the quality of governance, thereby reducing the appeal and eliminating the social foundation of a credible subversion attempt. The paper supports its argument with episode analysis on the 1988 farmer protest which was a largely neglected critical juncture in the history of Taiwan’s democratization. The KMT's constructive engagement with farmers' welfare concerns undermined the radical opposition's ability to mobilize them as a basis for a revolutionary challenge to Taiwan's political status. The failure of the subversive attempt led the opposition camp to recognize that participating in the political process through the electoral process represented the only path forward. Nevertheless, similar to loyal oppositions in other countries, electoral pressure was far from sufficient to compel the regime to transit as it did not contain any credible revolutionary threat. This finding challenges the prevailing narrative that the state-society confrontation drive democratization. Moreover this paper makes implications for studies on authoritarian-led democratization. The path to authoritarian-led democratization within well-governed regimes may be contingent upon the existence of a consensus between authoritarian legitimacy and society's contentious claims regarding the extension of political participation.

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 Presented in Session 157. Sources and Social Networks