A Spiral of Deinstitutionalization? Taiwan’s Kuomintang Party (KMT) and the Drama of the 2016 Presidential Candidate Nomination

As political scientists start applying the complex-system approach to study party politics and as business scholars start to apply communication theories to study deinstitutionalization, we propose to study and explain politics within a political party. This study employs a systematically collected field observation data to evaluate Clemente and Roulet’s (2015) “the spiral of deinstitutionalization” framework. Applying this framework to the study of an established and institutionalized party as the KMT, we are able to expose how party actors and agency can be key factors in understanding the process of both institutionalization and deinstitutionalization. Based on analysis of news events and internal reports within Kuomintang (KMT) from April 20 to October 17, 2015, we assess how well Clemente and Roulet’s framework explain the drama relating to the reneging of official nomination of Hung Hsiu-Chu (KMT’s first ever presidential candidate) barely three months before voters cast their votes in the presidential election on January 16, 2015. We construct and assemble the whole story and provide details that contribute to enriching the framework for future organizational and political party research