SOAS Research Online

Abstract

My first book, Party Politics in Taiwan: Party Change and the Democratic Evolution of Taiwan was published in August 2005. Now seems a good time to revisit this volume, as we are almost two decades from when I first started this research project. In this chapter I first discuss the origins of what became my PhD project on party change in the first decade of Taiwan’s multi-party politics. The book focused on three core questions about that period: How?, Why? and So what? In other words, it looks of how Taiwan’s parties changed ideologically, why they adjusted their issue positions, and the consequences of these changes. I briefly talk about the process of turning the PhD dissertation into a book manuscript, as well as how the book was reviewed in journals. After discussing the core findings of the book, I consider how the original research has stood the test of time and how the book has affected my subsequent research direction.