A Narrative Research On Taiwan Election Television Debates

The television debate is a major tradition in Taiwan election activities.This article selects Taiwan election debate TV programs from 2012 to 2016as research objects and conducts qualitative and quantitative research on the presidential candidates of Kuomintang and Democratic Progressive Party.It aims at grasping the disparity between two party's discourse strategies and subtle attitude changes in different period.This study helps to better understand the political elections in Taiwan and uses political discourse to view the differences and commonalities between two parties.The study found that Taiwan election television debates presented four characteristics:First,in "what to say",at event-focused level,the topic of the people's livelihood continued to "be popular",and the issues of Taiwan and Chinese mainland"cooled down".This phenomenon reflects that people in Taiwan don't care about the topics of Taiwan and Chinese mainland that much in contemporary Taiwanese society.At the character-focused level,candidates with lower previous polls often mentioned opponents and opposing parties and displayed a strong offensive posture,while those riding in high opinion polls adopted negative responses to ignore others.In "how to say",from the rhetorical method perspective,the Kuomintang prefers to use logical ways such as numbers,contrast and other ways to rationalize the problem,and presented comedy structure as a grand perspective.On the contrary,the narrative rhetoric in Democratic Progressive Party embodies more sensibility.It often achieves its persuasive purpose through fictional scenes and appealing to the power of "people."Its narrative structure is deeply tragic.In addition,populism influences the narrative construction of candidates.The power of "people" was "deified" as the power to determine everything in the televised debate.And the TV debate presents a binary opposition between "us" and "others."...