Browsing by Subject "Taiwanese politics"

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Political regimes and minority language policies : evidence from Taiwan and southeast Asia
(2021-12-06) Wu, Chun-Ying; Liu, Amy H.; Lin, Tse-min; Maclachlan, Patricia; Madrid, Raul L.; Hsu, Madeline Y.
What explains why some governments recognize minority languages – i.e., allow them to be taught formally in schools – while others do not? What explains why some governments impose more administrative restrictions on minority language education while others do not? Conventional wisdom would suggest government ideologies and structural factors. In this paper, I shift the focus and call attention to political regimes. I formally model minority language policies as the product of strategic bargaining between three actors: the head of government, the minority faction in the opposition, and the minority faction in alliance with the government. Specifically, I demonstrate that language policies made in democracies, royal dictatorships, and electoral dictatorships are more likely to recognize minority languages than either one-party dictatorships or military regimes. I test this proposition by tracing the development of political regime and language policies in Taiwan’s history (1683-2019) and by using an original time-series cross-sectional dataset of Chinese language education in twelve Southeast Asian States (independence - 2015). The dataset, built on my field research in Singapore and Taiwan, looks at language recognition on various levels including public versus private schools and primary versus secondary levels, as well as teaching hours and self-governance of minority schools. The results – estimated using Bayesian modeling, which are robust to different model specifications – suggest political regimes matter for language policies. Furthermore, some Southeast Asian dictatorships adopt a flexible and pragmatic strategy to simultaneously accommodate nationalist and Chinese educator’s request: they tolerate Chinese-owned schools using Chinese as the medium of instruction, yet they do not recognize the diploma of these schools. The contribution of this study is multifold: It speaks to research on ethnic politics, political institutions, Taiwanese studies, Southeast Asian studies, and Chinese diaspora studies.