ABSTRACT

This chapter is about the arguments for and the skeptics about the roles of civil society in contributing to Taiwan’s democratic transformation. The author chooses a professional based civil society organization (CSO), the Judiciary Reform Foundation (the JRF), to illustrate how has it become embedded in an alliance for different single-issue social movement organizations and contributed to the institutionalization of rule-of-law democracy. The author suggests that CSOs should be distinguished in two modes: the moral, religion, and tradition mode, and the movement, advocacy, and critical mode. The JRF belongs to the second category. The chapter shows how a particular middle-class professional association can have significant impacts on Taiwan’s democracy in multiple dimensions.