Approaches to the resolution of democratic predicament of current Taiwan via power-sharing democracy and deliberative democracy

• Main Authors: Yuan, Shuo Cheng, 袁碩成
• Other Authors: 顧忠華
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/6m6tjr

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 社會學系 === 99 === This thesis explores the feasibility of mitigating ethnic conflict of current Taiwan employing the methods of power-sharing democracy and deliberative democracy. First of all, the causes and the key difficult problems of democratic predicament, and the dispute in national identity between the pan-blue and pan-green camps, as those currently exist in Taiwan, are discussed in greater detail. The key difficult problems appear to be conflict in identities and political distrust. Next, based on the existing literature of power-sharing democracy, this thesis identifies the normative ideas and empirical evidences that are relevant to the settlement of democratic predicament of current Taiwan. After an in depth analysis, it concludes that the use of consociational approach to manage democratic predicament of current Taiwan should be the direction worth trying. The so-called modified consociational democracy, which is formed to meet the deliberative requirements of publicity and reciprocity, by replacing consociational decision making with deliberation, may provide more possibility for longer-term goal of ethnic conflict resolution. Likewise, based on the existing literature of deliberative democracy, this thesis identifies the normative ideas and empirical evidences that are relevant to the settlement of democratic predicament of current Taiwan. After an in depth analysis, it concludes that, theoretically, the use of ideal deliberation approach appears capable of dealing with the democratic predicament of current Taiwan. Although it is not possible to create Habermas’s ideal speech situation on a precise level, it is possible to achieve ISS approximately. However, there did not exist any empirical evidence in the literature to demonstrate that the application of deliberative democracy alone may provide conflict resolution of the national identity problem in deeply divided societies. In order to let both sides of the conflicting groups be willing to participate freely in the dialogue, be willing to respect one another, and be willing to communicate rationally, it is necessarily to provide both sides with power-sharing incentives tailored to make both sides feel absolutely secure. In addition, in order to evaluate how close the dialogue or deliberative approaches the conditions of ideal speech situation, it is necessarily to have a quantitative measuring instrument at our disposal and the discourse quality index (DQI) is such an instrument. Therefore, power-sharing and DQI tend to form two effective tools for strengthening the deliberative democracy. Finally, this thesis proposes the modified consociational democracy as the present stage strategy for the resolution of democratic predicament of current Taiwan.