This new Routledge Major Work is a four-volume collection which gathers the best and most influential research on the contemporary politics of Taiwan. Although the collected materials are in English, they include contributions from leading Taiwan experts in Europe, the United States, Japan, and Taiwan.
Volumes I (‘Nationalism and National Identity’) and II (‘Democratization, Democratic Consolidation’) address the two key issues that have received the most attention from political scientists working on Taiwan. Gathered here is the best research on competing nation-building projects and national identities, including the ‘Taiwanese versus Chinese’ identity debate. Various explanations for Taiwan’s democratic transition are explored in depth. Other topics include religion and democracy, along with appraisals of Taiwan’s democratic consolidation and its current state.
The scholarship collected in Volume III (‘Consequences of Democratization’) examines the policy implications of democratization while the last volume (‘Party and Local Politics’) focuses on salient issues in Taiwan’s domestic politics. There is a growing literature addressing a broad range of aspects of the island’s political development since the advent of multi-party politics in the late 1980s. Volumes III and IV pay particular attention to the following topics: political corruption; constitutional reform; the creation of a social welfare system; party systems and party politics; political communication and electoral politics; changing patterns in local politics; the development of social movements; and the political impact of the change in ruling parties in 2000.
Politics of Modern Taiwan is fully indexed and has a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context. It is an essential work of reference and is destined to be valued by scholars and students as a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.
Dafydd Fell is the Lecturer in Taiwan Studies at the Department of Political Studies and Centre for Financial and Management Studies of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). He is also the Deputy Director of the SOAS Centre of Taiwan Studies and coordinator of the European Association of Taiwan Studies. He teaches courses on Taiwan politics and Taiwan society and culture. He is the convenor of the MA in Taiwan Studies. He has published articles on inter-party competition, inner party democracy, the women’s movement, political corruption, and electioneering in Taiwan. His first book was Party Politics in Taiwan (Routledge, 2005) which looks at party platform change in Taiwan’s first fifteen years of multi-party politics. He has just completed an edited volume examining the impact of the island’s first change in ruling parties in 2000. He is now working on a book analysing patterns and consequences of inner-party democracy in Taiwanese parties.
