Why do competitive elections harbinger democracy in some countries, but fail to trigger democratic transitions or even strengthen autocracy in others? Current literature presents contradictory theories on the role of elections in democratic transitions. This thesis proposes an new argument that the role of elections is conditioned on state bureaucracy: patrimonial state bureaucracy facilitates patron-client usage of state resources by the ruling authority to control voters and deter potential oppositions; rationalization of state bureaucracy, which is defined as using clear and stable standards guiding state bureaucracy in distributing state resources, will weaken the patron-client controls of elections, and hence enables democratization by elections. The empirical evidence fo...[ Read more ]

Why do competitive elections harbinger democracy in some countries, but fail to trigger democratic transitions or even strengthen autocracy in others? Current literature presents contradictory theories on the role of elections in democratic transitions. This thesis proposes an new argument that the role of elections is conditioned on state bureaucracy: patrimonial state bureaucracy facilitates patron-client usage of state resources by the ruling authority to control voters and deter potential oppositions; rationalization of state bureaucracy, which is defined as using clear and stable standards guiding state bureaucracy in distributing state resources, will weaken the patron-client controls of elections, and hence enables democratization by elections. The empirical evidence for this argument is from analyzing Taiwan’s democratic transitions. This thesis identified that a series of fiscal reforms since 1981, which have hardly been noticed by current literature of Taiwan’s democratization and even have been understudied in the scholarship of fiscal history, regulated allocation of fiscal transfer among local government, and thus harmed the ruling party’s electoral impregnability. The thesis collects information on the fiscal reforms from original bureaucratic archive and makes a causal analysis of the reforms’ influence on Taiwan’s authoritarian elections through both quantitative and qualitative methods.