ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 begins with the research puzzles of the book: As a successful third-wave democracy in East Asia, why did Taiwan’s press freedom improve along with democratization in the 1990s but instead deteriorate after the second peaceful turnover of power in 2008 which symbolized democratic consolidation? Considering the liberal view in international relations, why did Taiwan’s press freedom make significant improvements accompanying Taiwan’s close economic connections with the US during the Cold War, only to become eroded when Taiwan developed deeper economic ties with China at the end of the first decade of the 21st century? This chapter then proposes a political economy explanation of the development and degradation of freedom of the press in Taiwan from 1949 through 2016. Domestically, it argues that a state tends to have a low or high level of press freedom, when its government plays a more or less interventionist role in the market economy. At the international level, the argument is that a state’s press freedom should improve or deteriorate, when it depends economically on a liberal or repressive hegemon. Following this, the chapter explains the research approach (i.e. historical institutionalism), methods (i.e. multiple within-case comparisons and process tracing), and data (i.e. archives, interviews, and others) adopted to examine the case of Taiwan in relation to the proposed theory.
