| Abstrakt: |
The Republic of China on Taiwan has long reserved legislative seats for its indigenous minorities, known collectively as yuanzhumin, providing an important avenue of influence in national politics for these historically marginalized peoples. In practice, however, these legislators have struggled to provide effective pan-indigenous representation. A key reason is that they are chosen via the personalistic single non-transferable vote electoral system, under which parties making pan-indigenous appeals have repeatedly failed to win any seats. Cooperation among indigenous legislators has been consistently hampered by socioeconomic, factional, tribal, constituency, and especially partisan divisions. At a few critical moments, yuanzhumin representatives have managed to overcome these divisions and use their collective bargaining power to win important changes to state policies. Nevertheless, the legislative achievements of the indigenous representatives as a whole have been relatively modest. The Taiwan case thus provides a cautionary tale for indigenous and other minority group representation: the mere creation of reserved seats, however well-intentioned, is not enough to ensure that collective group interests are well-articulated in representative institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
