This chapter discusses factors that have an impact on the capacity of members of the Legislative Yuan to act internationally and in this way contribute to parliamentary diplomacy of Taiwan. A great deal of the analysis in this section is based on 73 interviews conducted with 62 interviewees. For various reasons, mostly associated with the political sensitivity of the topic and related research, the position they occupied and/ or the (political) status they had at the time of conducting interviews, the interviewees agreed to talk to us if our discussion was off the record. We honour their trust in the following way. When we refer directly to an interviewee, we do so by providing general information about his or her position at the time of the interview. We also provide information about the place and date of the interview. All interviews have been done in the period 2016–2020. The majority of them have been conducted in Taipei, others have taken place by using telecommunication applications or by email. We have opted for semi-structured interviews to allow our respondents to reflect on the topic, and also broadly about challenges and opportunities for Taiwan's parliamentary diplomacy. The interviewees have been informed about the background and the aim of the research. We have told them that the focus of our research is the period since the early 1990s when parliamentary diplomacy was introduced to Taiwan's foreign policy. We have explained to them that we aimed to understand better the potential of parliamentarians to help Taiwan pursue its foreign policy. The maximum time devoted to an interview was between 30 minutes and 90 minutes, and the average time spent in an interview roughly 60 minutes.

Our group of interviewees is diverse. We have met no less than 18 parliamentarians who were members of the Legislative Yuan at that time. Four of them were from the KMT, and 14 from the DPP. We have been fortunate to include several prominent KMT and DPP parliamentarians among our interviewees. On the executive branch side, we have interviewed eight officials. At the time of conducting those interviews, all of them were employees of the MOFA, some of whom were directly involved in coordinating parliamentary visits. From the administrative and research support side, we have interviewed seven individuals, including a high-ranking official in the Legislative Yuan and a person with experience in coordinating activities in the parliament.