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Transcending Ideological Barriers for Voting? New Applications of Political Territory Analysis in the 2014 Taipei City

  •  Shun-chuan Chang and Wen-jong Juang
  •  2017 / 05  

    Volume 24, No.1

     

    pp.97-132

  •  10.6612/tjes.2017.24.01.97-132

Abstract

The 2014 Taipei City mayoral election was overwhelmingly won by a grass-roots candidate, Dr. Wen-je Ko, who has been regarded as “Deep Green” in terms of Taiwan’s political spectrum, but promoted the slogan “One City One Family” for new white power in this campaign. The rooted voting behaviors described by traditional political territories in Taipei City were supposed to be on the verge of imminent collapse, and whether the signal of transcending ideological barriers for voting in this case was grounded in reality or myth, is still worth exploring. This study conducted several tests for trend analyses used in nonparametric statistics and interpreted new applications based on political territory in this mayoral election.
Furthermore, this study has three primary innovative perspectives. First, based on the voting database from the Central Election Commission for election studies, this study can explain how to utilize the basic unit of household address, such as Li, for building political territories, and our models presented the grouping political spectrum structures of voting behaviors of voters living in Taipei City by clustering analysis. This study can also develop a more novel approach to the combination of domestic political territory research and trend analyses embedded in nonparametric statistics, such as the Mann-Kendall test, the Theil-Sen's slope estimator, and Pettit test statistics for change-point detection, which are all adapted to analyze the trend characteristics for changing voting behaviors in Taipei City. Finally, based on built political territories, and linked with relevant concepts of political polarization, political party identity, and allocation effects when political parties drum up votes, the research results can determine and gain insight into the transcending of ideological barriers for voting in the 2014 Taipei City mayoral election.