Taiwan’s Democratic Consolidation, 2000 - 2001, About 1000 Internet documents collected by Christan Goebel

Introduction by C. Goebel

This small collection is the result of my online-harvest of newspaper articles and documents I deemed useful for my Master’s thesis. The aim of the thesis was to trace the process of Taiwan’s democratic consolidation. Owing to the impossibility to (yet) delineate a theoretical concept of democratic consolidation which is both wide enough to be applied to all regimes which have lived through democratic transition and yet specific enough to be of analytical use, I formed a concept which specifically applies to the case in question. Choosing an inductive process-tracing approach, I of course was confronted with a huge number of explanatory variables, which led me to explore areas as diverse as:

• Taiwanese national identity
• the international environmentinstitutional reforms
• legal reforms
• financial reforms
• local factions
• corruption and vote-buying
• party platform development
• parliamentary bargaining processes
• elite backgrounds
• public attitudes

The Internet proved to be a valuable source of information, as all of Taiwan’s major newspapers and magazines can be accessed online, as well as all legal documents and many official statements. Apart from these sources, which form the bulk of my archive, I was also able to collect a number of Master’s theses and a few extensive opinion surveys conducted by Academica Sinica’s Institute of Anthropology. The material presented here covers mainly the years 2000 and 2001. Please note that these files only served as a supplement for what I could not find in print and were, at first, not intended to be accessed publicly. Neither do they constitute a complete collection on the various subjects they cover, nor is their naming always consistent.