ABSTRACT
Taiwan’s experiences with democratic transition are analytically distinctive from the standpoints of a global crisis of authoritarian regimes and concurrent movements toward democracy. Over the last decade, the incumbent elite has managed to engineer a dual transition: a transition from what Giovanni Sartori termed “a party-state system”1 (or what Samuel Huntington and Clement Moore termed “a single-party authoritarian system”) to what T.J.Pempel termed “a one-party dominant regime”2 and a parallel transformation of the Kuomintang (KMT) itself from a quasi-Leninist revolutionary party3 into a voluntary mass-based political party. The two processes were empirically overlapping but conceptually distinctive. One involves the organizing principles of a political system and the other a concrete political organization with its own autonomy and coherence.
