TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — “Making Punches Count: The Individual Logic of Legislative Brawls” is a new book exploring violence in legislatures around the world, and was published shortly after scuffles in Taiwan’s legislature made global headlines.
This might seem like especially good timing, but for co-author Nathan Batto, it was not unexpected. “There have been brawls in Taiwan every few months for the last 35 years, I fully expected that to be the case again,” said Batto, speaking to Taiwan News via video call on Wednesday (June 20).
Batto is an associate research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Political Science who has written extensively on legislatures and Taiwan elections. He co-authored the book with the Director of International Studies at the University of Kentucky Emily Beaulieu and began researching legislative violence after the Sunflower Movement protests of 2014.
The scuffles in Taiwan’s legislature draw global attention. From the pig-gut slinging clashes over pork imports in 2020 to the most recent theatrics in May over amendments expanding legislative powers.
Batto and Beaulieu’s “Making Punches Count” is the first comprehensive study of these incidents and covers legislative violence in Taiwan, Ukraine, Turkey, South Korea, and other countries. The book includes examinations of violence on the legislative floor, why it happens, who it targets, and its impact on democracy.
“The fundamental paradox is that these politicians are trying to win at the democratic game by doing something that's generally unpopular,” Batto said.
When individual politicians engage in violence on the legislative floor, it is a calculated strategy, he said. “They're trying to send a message about themselves, who they are and what kind of person they are, to a specific target audience that can help them with their political career.”
The target audience is not the general electorate as a whole, according to Batto. ”Voters hate this; It's disorderly, it's chaotic, it's embarrassing, frankly.”
He said the target audience is instead voters who are already strong supporters of the politician’s party. “They might not like it either, but they learn something about you because you send them a credible message that you are a good partisan soldier, you'll fight for the party's positions, and you're willing to pay a cost."
Politicians interviewed for the book did not see brawlers as “cool calculating politicians” making strategic moves to gain influence. Rather, they explained the incidents as “fighting for democracy” or opposing measures that would have “terrible consequences for the country,” Batto said.
Batto is less convinced by this explanation. “This is really about political communication, saying our party is energetic and fighting for our positions, no matter what those positions are.”
He described other research on the causes of violence in legislatures and found that threats to the health of a country's democracy are usually not what causes fights. He also said that contrary to popular opinion, “almost none of the legislative brawls (in Taiwan) are directly related to China.”
Batto said the research also found that women are not less likely to engage in legislative scuffles than men. However, he said when women fight, they are going against powerful gender stereotypes, and the cost of doing so is higher for them because of the potential backlash from voters who expect them to act a certain way.
This can go the other way too, as men fighting women goes against societal norms, alongside the risk of being accused of sexual misconduct amid an altercation. “Parties know this and they actively encourage women to be on the front lines, because they are harder to remove,” Batto said.
Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) appears to have “pioneered” a strategy to reduce this risk, using their hips to nudge through while keeping their hands in the air, he said. “The gender strategies are really complicated, and there are reasons to believe that the risks are higher for women, and the rewards might be higher for women.”
“What we can say is that the data show that women are not less likely to be involved than men in Taiwan, but that might not be the case everywhere."
After finishing the book, Batto said he no longer views legislative violence as a “terrible stain on Taiwan’s democracy” as he once did. When starting, he felt that the research might be able to dissuade politicians from taking this course of action and that he expected others to hold this point of view.
“But as we talked to a lot of legislators, one of the things I found was there are a lot of them who don't think it's a big deal; that this is just the way politics works here,” Batto said.
“There were a few legislators who said it was a terrible thing, but there were also legislators who just really weren't concerned. And the more I researched it, the less concerned I became.”
“It's not ideal, and I’d still like to figure out some way to discourage it, but it's not the top of my priorities anymore either,” he said.
“Making Punches Count: The Individual Logic of Legislative Brawls” is published by Oxford University Press. The book was released on May 24 in the U.S. and is set for release in other places on July 10.
