The Constitutional System: The Classification Of Party System

IV. The Classification of Party System Party System, unlike constitutional system, is not an institutional arrangement or rules of the political game, but is an imagined whole that is made up of all the relevant parties in a democratic regime. Party system is not just a collection of parties in a democratic country, but the matrix or the structure of interactive and competitive relationship between and among these political parties. This concept, party system, makes perfect semantic sense because, etymologically speaking, system means a whole that is made up of interrelated parts and party mean part. Thus, a party system is a system(whole) made up of parties(parts, in plural form). Party is a part of the whole(system, or state), it can
Two-party system has two major parties with more or less equivalent strength and each one has the potential to become majority party and govern alone. Two-party system may have third parties or minor parties as long as no one of them is large enough to prevent one of the two major parties to govern alone. Two-party system must have alternation or rotation of power between the two major parties. The rotation of power needs not to occur regularly like a pendulum but it can not occur so infrequently that the same party continues to govern for more than four terms without rotation, in that case the system should be called predominant party system. Taiwan has two major parties-the Kuomintang(the KMT or Nationalist Party) and the Democratic progressive Party (the DPP), and several minor parties. The two major parties sometimes even match Douglas Rae’s definition of two-party system: “those in which the first party holds less than 70% of the legislative seats, and the first two parties together hold at least 90% of the seats.” (Rae, 1971: 93) However, Rae’s definition of two-party system, though numerical and precise, is no good. From 1989 to 2000, the KMT continued to govern alone and turnover of power had not actually occurred so that during that period Taiwan remained a predominant party system, not a two-party system. Although rotation of power has occurred twice(once in 2000, and the other in 2008), but the DPP could
Vis-à-vis the properties of two-party system, the major distinguishing trait of moderate multi-party system is coalition government while that of the two-party system is one-party government. But the structure of moderate multi-party system, like two-party system, remains bipolar(instead of triangular) and the opposition remains unilateral(instead of bilateral). Moderate multi-party system is characterized by alternative coalitions-one on the right and the other on the left. The center of the political spectrum is unoccupied. Moderate multi-party system lacks relevant anti-system parties either at the extreme right or extreme left. All relevant parties in the system are governing-oriented, i.s., available for coalition government. And the coalitions are usually quite stable and the cabinets seldom break down and reshuffled between