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Home Issues Backissues Volume 31, No.1 The Continuity and Change of Political Efficacy in Taiwan: A Comparison before and after the Alternation of the Power

The Continuity and Change of Political Efficacy in Taiwan: A Comparison before and after the Alternation of the Power

Hsin-Hao Huang
2005 / 11
Volume 12, No.2

pp.111-147
10.6612/tjes.2005.12.02.111-147
Paper

Abstract

As Abramson (1983: 135) noted: Next to party identification, no political attitude has been studied more extensively than feelings of political effectiveness. In this study, I employ longitudinal data to explore the political efficacy in Taiwan, placing emphasis on the changing pattern, and demonstrate the factors influencing this attitude from 1998 to 2003, before and after the alternation of power. From our findings, first, we showed the distribution of Taiwanese political efficacy. The internal efficacy was relatively stable for this period, but the decreasing trend has appeared. On the other hand, the external efficacy increased after the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) won the 2000 presidential election. It means that the feelings of government responsiveness grow up after the alternation of ruling party in Taiwan. However, the decline of internal efficacy has shown that the mass public still think the politics was too complicated to understand. Second, I demonstrate some factors influencing the internal efficacy and external efficacy. The former indicated the political orientation of personal political competence for long terms. The Empirical result showed that the affected factors and coefficient direction were relatively similar over time. The latter, however, was influenced by social groups, included the ethnic backgrounds, party identification and the independence/unification issue positions. In addition, we tried to explain the theorical linkage between internal efficacy and external efficacy. That provides some possible suggestions in future studies.

Keywords

political efficacy

internal efficacy

external efficacy

alternation of ruling party

party identification

Taiwan independence vs. unification issue