Politics vs. Policy: A Framework to Understand Populism
By: Benjamin Pei-Wei Yang
Tags: Taiwan, Media Criticism, Politics, Policy, Populism

These two stickers on my laptop are courtesies of the 2014 Mayflower Movement in Taiwan, an event that prompted me to delve into the world of politics and social sciences at age 13.

The one on the top reads “Complete the Cross-Strait Agreement Supervisory Act”, a central policy demand of the movement; while the bottom one simply translates into “Save your own country”.

Five years on, the warcry still remains a rather popular phrase at campaign rallies and in popular culture, while the Act itself still remains practically non-existent after the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government rescinded the less than satisfactory draft the preceding Kuomintang (KMT) administration had proposed. The entire issue has not gained much public traction since and only few legislators and activists have continued their efforts in campaigning for the Act.

The fact that the perceptions of and discussions surrounding these two demands of the movement ended up so drastically different tells us something about our current political environment: that we have become obsessed with catchy slogans, we are captivated by explosive one-liners, and that we have come to perceive politics as a mere spectacle.

In other words, the reason behind such different fates of the two stickers is the general overemphasis on politics and thus the trivialisation of substantive policy issues.

Now, what I mean by this can pretty much be summed up by some of the headlines major media outlets in the United States have used since Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez revealed the Green New Deal (GND):

Notice that these discussions on the GND perpetrated by the media are predominated by its political implications, be it those on the building up to the 2020 nomination process or on the beef between the Democratic congressional leadership and newly elected progressives or on the Republicans’ 2020 strategy. All is present except the merit of the Green New Deal itself: whether it can actually promote renewable energy, upgrade to more energy-efficient power grids, cut greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation and agricultural sectors….all while introducing universal health care, increasing minimum wages, and preventing monopolies — which are actually debatable and deserve more substantive discussions given its scope and its ambitions.

This is just one exemplification of this worldwide phenomenon of treating politics as a spectacle, as some sort of a sporting event. Political debates now are about whether candidates are charismatic enough, whether they can “destroy” their opponents, whether they have thrown shade at someone else; not about how one will proceed to solve the issues of one’s constituents if elected, or the feasibility of one’s proposed solutions.

This is what I mean by the “overemphasis on politics” and the “trivialisation of policy”: a focus on strategy, on drama, on power-grabbing and a negligence of substantive issues.

This brings me to populism, an umbrella term that we have been using to describe figures and movements that appeal to “the people” and juxtapose them against an “elite” and/or some other group(s), while promising to solve pressing issues with overly simplistic answers in a rather emotional manner.

Before we move on though, I would just like to clarify the implications of the term “populism”. In this context, I refer not to a political ideology or doctrine, but rather a non-ideological political logic. It is “non-ideological” as in the term itself does not have any intrinsic tenets or values attached to it and can happen anywhere on the political spectrum; while it is a “logic” in a sense that it is a way to make sense of political phenomena and not a doctrine that argues for some certain type of policies or ways to govern.

With that established, we can use the politics/policy framework to understand the rise of political movements and figures that we deem as populist. Here I will use the Taiwanese referendums last year as an example.

In my earlier article Making Sense of the Conservative Populist Backlash in Taiwan’s Midterm Elections, I explained:

“By simply asking voters to choose between “yes” and “no”, it [direct democracy/the concept of referendums] overly simplifies and overlooks the complexity of the issues and policies at hand. Throughout the campaign, voters were bombarded with all sorts of information by advocacy groups and political figures, while expert opinions on more technical issues such as the use of nuclear power can be seriously and dangerously neglected.”

For the referendum on nuclear power, campaigners and the media in general framed it as “Going Green with Nuclear” (以核養綠), as a movement against the incumbent DPP administration’s incompetence in dealing with air pollution. With this campaign being tied together with that of conservative maverick and Taiwan’s latest media sensation Han Kuo-yu for the Mayor of Kaohsiung, the referendum was presented as a means to object the DPP’s rule in general. The referendum was eventually passed with 59% of voters voting “yes” and a turnout of 54%.

But the thing is, the official motion of the referendum reads “Do you agree to repeal Article 95 Paragraph 1 of the Electricity Act: ‘Nuclear-energy-based power generating facilities shall wholly stop running by 2025’”, with no reference to the development of renewable energy or air pollution management policies whatsoever.

Moreover, it was also revealed after the elections through a poll by National Taiwan University’s Risk Society and Policy Research Centre that 44% of respondents mistook nuclear energy as the main source of power generation — while in reality it only constitutes about 8% and it is coal that serves as the major source, standing at around 46%.

This, among many other cases and examples, shows the dangers of prioritising politics and downplaying policies.

When the prerequisite to getting any traction and having any chance to win elections is simply coming up with impressive slogans and dropping savage one-liners; when the media endlessly magnifies the strategic implications behind every political event, we become good political pundits at best. We will never become better voters.

This politics-centric approach fosters a kind of heroism among people in that we constantly expect someone to appear out of nowhere and solve all of our problems. In Taiwan, it was Ma ying-jeou (former President) 11 years ago, Ko Wen-je (current mayor of Taipei City) 5 years ago, and Han Kuo-yu now. Politicians like them have all been hailed as game changers who can rupture the status quo for the better — but has any of our problems really been solved? Has our political system become less corrupt? Has our political system become more transparent and accessible? Has our economic inequality really been addressed?

Democracy does not just happen every two years or four years when an election comes around.

Democracy requires us to constantly participate and supervise our elected officials.

If the problems are institutional, we elect people who know how to fix the system into the system and make sure that they do. We don’t just randomly throw seeming heroes into the system and expect everything to be fixed, and then just vote them out of office when they can’t fix them.

Populism, then, can be seen as an indicator of how there are in fact issues within our political system that need repair, and that the ruling elite is perhaps out of touch with the common people. But populism is not the answer. Prioritising politics over substantive policy discussions not only does not help, but further stimulates this vicious cycle.

So, when is the parliamentary deliberation on the Cross-Strait Agreement Supervisory Act happening again?