Country profile
Taiwan
Asia
TW · TWN
- Capital
- Taipei
- Population
- 23,317,031
- Area
- 36,197 km²
- Democracy index
- 91
- Regime type
- Robust Democracy
Events
Ballots from Taiwan
The latest elections, referendums, and opinion polls from Taiwan. Community totals are not official results.
Classification
Democracy profile
The score and regime label are assigned by Porto Voto using our in-house democracy index and classification framework, not ratings from governments or external agencies.
Democracy index
91/100
Regime type
Robust Democracy
Taiwan maintains a vibrant and mature democracy, characterized by its resilient institutional framework, strong commitment to the rule of law, and a highly competitive, multi party political landscape. The nation holds regular, transparent elections where peaceful transfers of power are the norm, and political institutions demonstrate significant autonomy from the executive branch. A robust civil society, coupled with a diverse and active media environment, ensures high levels of transparency and accountability, even amidst persistent challenges regarding regional security and external disinformation campaigns. While political polarization exists between the major governing parties, these tensions are managed entirely through established constitutional and legislative channels. The government remains responsive to public sentiment, and civil liberties, including freedom of expression and assembly, are rigorously protected, cementing the status of the island as a model of democratic governance in the region.
Last evaluation:
How we classify regimes →World Factbook
Country background
A concise introduction to Taiwan, together with notes on how power and law are organized, to put local ballots in context.
First inhabited by Austronesian people, Taiwan became home to Han immigrants beginning in the late Ming Dynasty (17th century). In 1895, military defeat forced China's Qing Dynasty to cede Taiwan to Japan, which then governed Taiwan for 50 years. Taiwan came under Chinese Nationalist (Kuomintang, KMT) control after World War II.
With the communist victory in the Chinese civil war in 1949, the Nationalist-controlled Republic of China government and 2 million Nationalists fled to Taiwan and continued to claim to be the legitimate government for mainland China and Taiwan, based on a 1947 constitution drawn up for all of China. Until 1987, however, the Nationalist Government ruled Taiwan under a civil war martial law declaration dating to 1948. Beginning in the 1970s, Nationalist authorities gradually began to incorporate the native population into the governing structure beyond the local level.
The democratization process expanded rapidly in the 1980s, leading to the then-illegal founding of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), Taiwan’s first opposition party, in 1986 and the lifting of martial law the following year. Taiwan held legislative elections in 1992, the first in over 40 years, and its first direct presidential election in 1996. In the 2000 presidential elections, Taiwan underwent its first peaceful transfer of power with the KMT loss to the DPP and afterwards experienced two additional democratic transfers of power in 2008 and 2016.
Throughout this period, the island prospered and turned into one of East Asia's economic "Tigers," becoming a major investor in mainland China after 2000 as cross-Strait ties matured. The dominant political issues continue to be economic reform and growth, as well as management of sensitive relations between Taiwan and China.