台灣政治消費文化：二次政黨輪替之後

This one-year research project, ‘Political Consumerism in Taiwan – After the Second Party Rotation’, explores ‘political consumerism’ as an actually existing phenomenon and as a new perspective on nationalism, especially after the second party rotation. Its empirical focus is the 2012 presidential election, when a more developed form of political consumerism will serve to formulate resistance, mobilize votes, gain power and most importantly, re-construct Taiwanese nationalism. The research draws on the author’s inside position as a former party staff member and a party supporter, actively involved in producing as well as consuming political commodities that had become part of popular culture, but subjects this experience to rigorous social scientific evaluation and contextualization. The research focuses on how the emerging Taiwanese identities were expressed and institutionalized by the political party’s appropriation of elements from Taiwanese culture to create Taiwanese nationalism. This enabled the party to mobilize voters through campaigns based, in significant part, on political consumerism. This is shown through ethnographic analysis of the field of staff members and their practices in producing political commodities for popular consumption – which fuses the political (building counter-hegemony) and the commercial (selling lifestyles). This analysis is complemented by a study of the party supporters’ community and the ways in which they consume these commodities. This shows how, through political staff members’ production and supporters’ consumption of political commodities, politics can be produced and consumed in the form of popular culture. This has enabled the de- and re-construction of nationalist hegemony and a transformation of the meaning of democracy. The analysis has tried to challenge the orthodoxy and methodologies of traditional studies on nationalism and aims to capture better the dynamics of the identity-shifting process. It will hopefully highlight the banality of people’s everyday practices, take into account the context of both researcher and researched, and explore the idea-practice nexus between intellectuals and the masses.