Journal of Electoral Studies

Issues

Home Issues Backissues Volume 31, No.1 The Establishment of Taiwanese Legislators' Campaign Promise Database

The Establishment of Taiwanese Legislators' Campaign Promise Database

Da-Chi Liao, Fu-Ren Li, Yu-Ci Huang, Zi-Yu Liu, and Cheng-Xun Lee
2012 / 11
Volume 19, No.2

pp.129-158
10.6612/tjes.2012.19.02.129-158
Paper

Abstract

In Taiwan's legislative elections, candidates running for office are required to submit campaign promises to be published in the Electoral Bulletin. This research considers that campaign promises published in Electoral Bulletins are the official commitments of the candidates and should not be disregarded as insignificant and unworthy of research. Moreover, the connection between the candidates' campaign promises and their performances after being elected should be studied in order to monitor their ”accountability” to voters. It is our hope that more emphasis is placed on ”campaign promises” printed in Electoral Bulletins, which would help to create a positive influence on the creation of a democracy.In order to achieve the above stated goal, this paper has established the ”Sixth and Seventh Legislative Campaign Promise Database” based on campaign promises by candidates during Taiwan's sixth and seventh term legislative elections. Hopefully this database would facilitate the research on issues related to the connection between campaign promises and the legislators' on-job performance after being elected.This paper will mainly cover the establishment process of this database, including the manual coding method and the latest information technology used for data mining, namely the multi-label classification method. This paper also attempts to compare and contrast these two methods and hopes to bring in the most advanced information technology to conduct a certain level of automated classification for campaign promises printed in Electoral Bulletins in every election.

Keywords

Legislative Yuan

legislators

campaign promise database

data mining

multi-label classification