Publication Details
- Authors
- Status / Format
- Preprint / Journal Article
- Citation
- Reidhead, Jacob and Kao, Chia-Lin, Organizational Inheritance and Conditional Centralization: Regional Party Leadership in Taiwan (August 28, 2026). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=7471522 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.7471522
- Year / Venue
- 2026 / SSRN
- Volume / Issue / Pages
- 25 pages
- Publisher / DOI / Document
Publication Content
Abstract
Why do national party leaders rely on locally rooted officials in some regions but install personnel who depend more directly on the center in others? We argue that regional leadership selection reflects the interaction of organizational inheritance and oligarchic strategy. Parties built through territorial penetration inherit routines and legitimacy for vertical control, aligning their founding structure with leaders' later incentives to coordinate and monitor the organization. Parties assembled through territorial diffusion inherit autonomous local networks and participatory commitments, making centralization more contested and conditional on political stakes. Taiwan offers a controlled comparison between the penetration-based Kuomintang (KMT) and the diffusion-based Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). We analyze 349 regional party-leader spells from 1978 to 2025 and classify each leader's highest prior electoral experience as none, local, regional, or national. KMT leaders are substantially more likely than DPP leaders to enter office without prior electoral experience, whereas DPP leaders are more often rooted in regional electoral careers. Regional experience is most common where a party dominates national legislative seats but not regional legislative seats, combining a valuable national base with territorial vulnerability. Multinomial logit models retain the KMT difference and this cross-tier pattern, while several higher-order interactions remain imprecise. The findings show that democratization does not homogenize party organization: common incentives to centralize operate through inherited center-periphery relationships that shape the personnel instruments, legitimacy costs, and regional resources available to party leaders.
Keywords
Organizational Inheritance, Taiwan, Party Institutionalization, Party Centralization, Intraparty Politics, Regional Leadership
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