Democratising party leadership selection in Japan and Taiwan

As interest in the causes and consequences of party primaries has been growing in the literature, there have been various studies on this topic for East Asian cases such as Japan and Taiwan. However, most of these studies focus on a single country, and few analyses have been conducted from a comparative perspective. Furthermore, most studies in the literature focus on specific parties or periods, and comprehensive data on primaries for leadership selection has not been gathered and presented systematically. In order to fill the gap, therefore, this chapter attempts to make a comparative analysis of Japan and Taiwan based on a newly constructed dataset1 covering all major parties that have used primaries for leadership selection.2 The chapter consists of four parts.