This series studies how constitutional democracies are made — and how they fail to be. It publishes evidence-graded research on the constitutional history of the Republic of China, the democratic development and electoral history of the ROC (Taiwan), and the comparative study of democratic transition as it bears on mainland China.
The series is anchored in a single conviction: that the Chinese-speaking world’s experience with representative government deserves the same rigorous, document-level treatment as any other democratic history. Each paper is built from primary sources — constitutional texts, official gazettes, election returns, court records, contemporaneous reporting, and archived dissident and rights-defense documentation — and each carries an explicit statement of its method, its evidence grades, the competing interpretations it considered and why they were set aside, and the limits of what its sources can support.
The series is organized in subseries. Taiwan Democratic Development and Electoral History studies party competition, electoral institutions, voter behavior, and democratic consolidation in the ROC (Taiwan) from the first direct presidential election of 1996 to the present. Companion studies in the series cover the Democratic Progressive Party as an institution (DPP-01), the constitutional history of the ROC (ROC-CONST-01), and democratic transition studies in the comparative sense (ROC-TRANS-02).
A note on scope and analogy. This series treats the ROC (Taiwan) record as a record of what happened — not as a template that transfers automatically to the PRC (Mainland). The two differ fundamentally in social structure, institutional conditions, and the development of civil society; any analogy between them requires a comparability argument made in the open, paper by paper, and is evaluated as part of each paper’s review. The research archive that supports this series — including rights-defense documentation and issue reporting from the mainland — is there precisely to keep the two records distinct and comparable at once.
Every approved paper carries an abstract, keywords, methodology, evidence grades, precise citations, competing interpretations, research limitations, author attribution to the Free China Movement, and version history. A paper’s listing here is not an assertion of independent peer review beyond what its review statement documents.
Subseries
- Taiwan Democratic Development and Electoral History — index
Also in this series
- DPP-01 — Democratic Progressive Party study (published)
- ROC-CONST-01 — ROC constitutional studies (published)
- ROC-TRANS-02 — Democratic transition studies (published)
Series papers
- How to Use This Archive: A Researcher’s Guide — how to read, cite, and grade the archive’s evidence
- The Rights Defense Network Issue Reports as a Source: Method and Limits — the binding source protocol for Rights Defense Network issue reports
Publication standard
Each approved paper carries an abstract, keywords, methodology, evidence grades, precise citations, competing interpretations, research limitations, author attribution (Free China Movement), and version history. Listing here does not imply independent peer review of manuscripts not yet released.