Basically, the citizens in Taiwan have signaled very powerfully that anything that reduces the bandwidth of citizens’ participation is a non-starter for politicians in the representative regime. So nowadays, all the four major parties in our parliament compete on how much more democratic they can be, how much more open and participatory they can be — and accuse each other for being slow and not agile in responding to the citizens. But nobody wants to go back to the bad old days of the pre–open government movement. And that’s why I think they signed on to the Open Parliament National Action Plan, and that’s why it’s one of the very few things that they can broadly agree on in the parliament.

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