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Home Issues Backissues Volume 31, No.1 The Exploration and Measurement of Political Parties' Electoral Errors in SNTV and Its Application: The Case of Taiwan's Legislative Yuan Elections (1992-2004)

The Exploration and Measurement of Political Parties' Electoral Errors in SNTV and Its Application: The Case of Taiwan's Legislative Yuan Elections (1992-2004)

Jong-Tian Wang
2008 / 05
Volume 15, No.1

pp.51-72
10.6612/tjes.2008.15.01.51-72
Paper

Abstract

Taiwan is the only democratic country currently using Single Nontransferable Vote System (SNTV) to elect its national-level representatives. The main purposes of this article are, from the perspective of measurement, to explore the appropriateness of traditionally defined categories of errors committed by political parties in SNTV and suggest a more precise taxonomy. In addition, the author attempts to apply the advanced taxonomy to the measurement of Legislative elections and, accordingly, to evaluate the electoral performance of the two prominent political parties in Taiwan, i.e., the KMT and the DPP. Finally, the never-been-proved phenomenon of large parties' over-representation in Taiwan will also be tackled, using data gathered under the guidance of the taxonomy. The major arguments and findings of this article are as follows: first, the traditionally defined error committed by political parties is not precise. The author also finds it better to define errors from the perspective of electoral outcome rather than from the point of whether optimal number of candidate has been nominated. Second, political parties have to pay the highest price for committing error of ”undernomination and fail to equalize the vote.” Third, the DPP outperforms the KMT in all of the indicators used in this article. Lastly, but not the least, the key to the over-representation of large parties in SNTV lies in the errors committed by other large parties and small parties. District magnitude, however, does not play a role in explaining the phenomenon. It is the author's hope that the advanced taxonomy proposed by this article can help to shed light on many other issues in the literature.

Keywords

categories of error

district magnitude

MAXS

seat bonuses

single nontransferable vote system SNTV