Article Democracy-driven Transformation to Regulatory State: The Case of Taiwan

Like some other new democracies, Taiwan has transformed from a developmental state to a regulatory state with increasing procedural rationality and substantive legal controls. However, the driving forces for such a profound change and its consequences remain to be explored further and addressed against the backdrops of Taiwan’s development context as wel as the global trend. This paper argues that the shift to regulatory state took place in Taiwan not as a result of explicit government policies, but as an inevitable consequence of democratization. Major legislation facilitating the forming of a regulatory state was introduced in the backdrop of democratization in the 1990s in parallel with certain pressures from international network. Increasing judicial controls over regulatory matters were made possible by legislative enactments triggered by democratization. More importantly, institutional constraints on the regulatory state bears strong procedural nature as demonstrated by both major legislation and court rulings. This process-centric feature enjoys the potency of developing a dialectic regulator