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Home Issues Backissues Volume 31, No.1 The Impact of President's Performance on Taiwan's Local Elections - Analyzing the 2009 Magistrate Elections

The Impact of President's Performance on Taiwan's Local Elections - Analyzing the 2009 Magistrate Elections

Eric Chen-Hua Yu
2012 / 05
Volume 19, No.1

pp.69-95
10.6612/tjes.2012.19.01.69-95
Paper

Abstract

Taiwan's ruling party, Kuomintang (KMT), handed a loss to the opposition party, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), in the 2009 Magistrate Elections. The conventional wisdom suggests two competing arguments to interpret the election results-while some argued that the KMT's loss was mainly due to the lack of partisan mobilization within the KMT, some posited that it was because a significant proportion of voters changed their voting preferences from the KMT to the DPP between the 2008 national and 2009 local elections.In fact, both arguments share the same premise: there exists a linkage between the performance of the ruling party (in the central government) and its electoral prospect in local elections. Specifically, the performance of President Ma has a substantial impact on the 2009 local election. This study utilizes survey data to verify such premise. Our data analysis shows that a voter's assessments on President Ma's job performance as well as on general and personal economic conditions affect his/her voting intention. In other words, we found that the ”referendum voting model,” in which voters caste their votes in midterm elections on a basis of their evaluations of the ruling party, properly explains voting behavior in Taiwan's midterm elections such as the 2009 local elections.

Keywords

retrospective voting

referendum voting

local election

assessment of job performance