【By Austin Ramzy】

The people of Taiwan appear poised to elect their first female president. Two of the three leading candidates in the January election, including the nominees of both major parties, are women.

Women have led other Asian nations, but they have largely followed in the footsteps of male relatives. Not in this case. Rather, analysts say, the race reflects the fact that Taiwan does a better job of putting women into political office than just about anywhere else in the world.

The island “amazed me when I first started looking at it,” said Joyce Gelb, a professor emeritus at the City University of New York who researches women in politics. “It’s second only to the Scandinavian countries, which are the bellwethers of women’s representation. I think it’s very impressive.”

Explanations for the rise of women within Taiwan’s political class abound, including the matriarchal traditions of some Taiwanese aboriginal tribes and the promotion of women’s education during the Japanese colonial period.

But the most influential factor, scholars say, is a series of quotas that have gradually been imposed to ensure that women are represented in government. While the origin of the policies goes back decades, it was only after the advent of multiparty politics in the 1980s that women began to make significant strides.

The front-runner in the current campaign is Tsai Ing-wen, 59, of the opposition Democratic Progressive Party. She lost her first bid for the presidency in 2012 but has maintained a strong lead in polls this time. Her chief contender, from the long-powerful Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party, is Hung Hsiu-chu, 67, the vice president of Taiwan’s legislature.

The contest contrasts sharply with the situation scarcely more than 100 miles away in mainland China, which considers the self-ruled Taiwan part of its territory. The mainland has had a dearth of female leaders despite a Communist Party ideology that emphasizes the importance of women to society. Only two of the country’s 25 Politburo members are women, and none have reached the top echelon of political power, the Politburo Standing Committee.

Elsewhere in the region, the president of South Korea, Park Geun-hye, is the daughter of the man who held that office from 1962 to 1979. The former Philippine president Corazon C. Aquino was the wife of a senator, and her successor Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is the daughter of a former president. Bangladesh’s president, Sheikh Hasina, is a daughter of the country’s first president, and its former prime minister Khaleda Zia was the wife of a former president.

But in Taiwan, neither Ms. Tsai nor Ms. Hung has a family connection to a prominent male politician.

Efforts to bring more women into the political system began when the 1951 Constitution set aside a small number of legislative seats for women in what was then an authoritarian state. By the time democratization began, the idea that women should have a certain level of participation was already well established.

Democratization also coincided with a growing feminist movement, and women played a crucial role in organizing against the authoritarian government in the 1970s and ’80s.

The first and biggest opposition group, the Democratic Progressive Party, set its own minimums for gender representation in 1996, decreeing that a quarter of its nominees for elected office had to be women. Two years later, it expanded that quota to candidates for elected party positions.

“The D.P.P. is, after all, a party that started from social movements of advancing political and social rights and equality, so it’s natural that gender rights were part of the platform,” said Ketty W. Chen, senior deputy director of the party’s department of international affairs.

The Kuomintang introduced similar quotas after it lost the 2000 presidential election.

In 2005, the Constitution was changed to set aside 15 percent of the seats in the legislature for women. Since then, the level of women’s representation has climbed steadily, to 33.6 percent after the last election in 2012, from 21.3 percent in 2004, according to statistics compiled by Chang-Ling Huang, an associate professor of political science at National Taiwan University.

Ms. Huang says the reserved seats helped bring increasingly competitive female candidates into politics. “I’d argue that thanks to gender quotas or women’s reserved seats, Taiwanese are now quite familiar with female faces in politics,” she said.

Hsu Chiao-Hsin, a spokeswoman for Ms. Hung’s campaign, said the strong presence of women in the coming election is part of a global trend.

“In countries around the world, there have been more and more women in politics recently, like Hillary Clinton and Angela Merkel,” she said. “This shows that in politics, gender is no longer a glass ceiling. Having two women as candidates for the two parties, the Kuomintang and D.P.P., bears this out.”

Ms. Tsai and Ms. Hung are markedly different in style. Ms. Tsai, who served as minister of Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council and as vice premier during the Chen Shui-bian administration, from 2000 to 2008, has degrees from Cornell University Law School and the London School of Economics. She has been described as shy for a politician, and when speaking in public, she sometimes comes across like a schoolteacher.

Ms. Hung has been called “little hot pepper” for her fiery speeches, and she rose through the ranks of the Kuomintang. She received a graduate degree from Northeast Missouri State University, first won a seat in the legislature in 1990 and has since served seven terms in the chamber.

Yet while a victory by either would be groundbreaking for Taiwan, that possibility is not an important issue in the campaign, in another sign of how familiar female candidates have become here.

“At the end of the day, the gender question is decidedly secondary,” said Nathan Batto, a political scientist at Academia Sinica, a state-financed research institution in Taipei. “The question in this election, as with every election in Taiwan, is fundamentally about Taiwan’s relationship with China. The fact that both major candidates are women doesn’t change the fact that the real thing that divides them is very different ideas about what Taiwan’s relationship with China should be.”

Ms. Tsai’s party leans toward independence for Taiwan, a position that has worried the Obama administration. After she visited the United States before the 2012 election, the administration said it was concerned that she and her party might upend relations with China.

Ms. Tsai’s supporters said the American criticism had undermined her chances.

She returned to the United States in the spring, however, and pledged to maintain the status quo with Beijing. Since then, Washington has issued no complaints.

Ms. Hung, whose Kuomintang has cultivated close ties with China, has indicated that she would push for even closer ones.

But with Ms. Hung trailing in most polls, some analysts have begun to suggest that the Kuomintang may face a major defeat in legislative elections that will coincide with the presidential vote. That could bring another electoral first in Taiwan: D.P.P. control of both the presidency and the legislature.

[The New Tork Times, 2015-09-10]