What Taiwan’s democracy costs and what it means for the diaspora who carry its weight

Taiwan ranked 12th globally and first in Asia in the 2024 Democracy Index compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit. It received a perfect score of 10 out of 10 in electoral process and pluralism and maintained its classification as a full democracy.

For context, the U.S. ranked 28th on the 2024 EIU Democracy Index and is classified as a flawed democracy. In 2025, the EIU score dropped further to 7.65, its lowest since the index began in 2006.

For Taiwan, those rankings exist in a specific context. It is a society conducting free elections, maintaining civil liberties, and sustaining democratic institutions while under sustained military, political, and informational pressure from a neighboring state that does not recognize its right to exist as a separate political entity.

What Taiwan’s democracy means in global discussions about democratic governance is not only a question of institutional performance. It is a question of what democracy looks like when its survival is not guaranteed. The United States under Trump is one such cautionary tale.

The EIU Democracy Index, Freedom House’s Freedom in the World assessment, and comparable indices consistently place Taiwan among the world’s strongest democracies. Taiwan’s democratic system has allowed for regular peaceful transfers of power since 2000, and protections for civil liberties are generally robust across multiple independent assessment frameworks.

What distinguishes Taiwan’s case is not the quality of its democratic institutions measured against global peers. By that measure, Taiwan performs exceptionally. It is the conditions under which those institutions operate and have been built.

Most full democracies in the world do not conduct their elections under the active threat of military intervention by a neighboring state. Taiwan does. The Third Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1996, in which the PRC conducted missile tests in waters near Taiwan during the island’s first direct presidential election, established early in Taiwan’s democratic transition that its electoral process would operate under external military pressure.

That pressure has not diminished in the decades since. Taiwan’s democratic institutions have consolidated, its civil society has developed a robust capacity to identify and counter disinformation campaigns, and its population has shifted decisively toward a civic democratic identity. It has done so under conditions designed to erode democratic confidence and create openings for political accommodation with Beijing. The fact that those conditions have produced the opposite effect is the central finding of Taiwan as a democratic case study.

Taiwan’s relationship to migration and belonging operates in multiple directions. Taiwanese emigrants who built communities in the United States, Australia, and elsewhere carry Taiwan’s political situation with them as a personal stake rather than an abstract concern. The question of where Taiwan belongs in the world order is also, for those communities, a question of where they belong in the countries that received them.

In Milwaukee, that relationship has produced a specific kind of silence. As a result, the city’s Taiwanese and ethnic Chinese communities have been reluctant to speak on the record with journalists. The immigration conditions of 2025 and 2026, and the fear of Trump’s use of ICE as a private Gestapo force, have made visibility in the attention economy costly enough that these individuals decline interviews even under anonymity protection.

Taiwan’s democratic ranking and Milwaukee’s diaspora silence are not separate stories. They are the same story at different scales. A society that has held its democratic identity under three decades of existential military pressure produces people who carry that pressure with them. When those people settle in cities like Milwaukee, the pressure does not disappear.

What democracy looks like when its survival is not guaranteed is the question Taiwan answers publicly, in elections and institutions, under military threat. What belonging looks like when visibility carries a high cost is the question Milwaukee’s Taiwanese community answers privately, in silence, under a different kind of pressure. Both answers belong in the same global conversation.

The people who persist in that silence, in Milwaukee and in every other mid-sized American city where Taiwan’s diaspora settled and went largely unnoticed, are the human expression of what Taiwan’s democratic case study actually means at ground level. Not a ranking. Not a statistic. A choice, made daily, about how much of yourself it is safe to show.