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Home Issues Backissues Volume 31, No.1 The Political Psychology of Lee Teng-hui Complex and Its Effects on Voting Behavior

The Political Psychology of Lee Teng-hui Complex and Its Effects on Voting Behavior

Huo-Yan Shyu
1998 / 11
Volume 5, No.2

pp.35-71
Paper

Abstract

This paper examines the nature and its correlated characteris-tics of what has been popularly termed "Lee Teng-hui complex" in Taiwan's political discourse in the 1990s by an analysis of available post-electoral survey data sets collected between 1994 and 1996. As measured by a set political affect toward President Lee Teng-hui, our findings show that Lee Teng-hui complex is a kind of stable mass political psyche mainly reflecting a pride of being Taiwanese as well as Chinese. Moreover, Lee Teng-hui complex is ascer-tained to be a syndrome as it is found to have significant and posi-tive correlation with two sets of polarized and negatively related po-litical attitudes that taping so-called "Taiwan mind" and "China con-cerns" respectively at the same time. A conjecture in electoral campaign that ascribes Taiwanese' s Lee Teng-hui complex as a psy-chological foundation in supporting Taiwan independence is there-fore empirically ungrounded with the available data, given that Lee Teng-hui is the first and foremost Taiwanese President. Thirdly, ethnicity, Taiwanese pride, China concerns are all found to be sig-nificant predictors of Lee Teng-hui complex, and the causal effects are held consistent against different data sets in point. Finally, with multinomial logit analysis, Lee Teng-hui complex is found as a consistent and significant psychological factor, along with party i-dentification, in directing voter's final vote-choice in recent elec-tions, especially in the presidential election held in 1995 in which in-cumbent President Lee Teng-hui involved.

Keywords

Lee Teng-hui complex

Taiwan mind

China concerns

Taiwanese pride

Chinese pride