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Home Issues Backissues Volume 31, No.1 Political Party Supporters in Hong Kong Elections

Political Party Supporters in Hong Kong Elections

Kin-sheun Louie
1998 / 05
Volume 5, No.1

pp.181-205

Abstract

The conventional approach of measuring party identification is applicable to political systems in which (1) the electoral competition is mainly between two major parties, (2) both parties are established and entrenched, (3) the electoral system is stable. To gauge party identification in a multi-party setting or in an early stage of election and party development, a modified and novel scheme is required. This article takes the vote choice as the starting point to gauge the sentiment of support among the Hong Kong electorate towards the political parties. An elector's vote choice is cross-checked by a number of other factors in order to ascertain the strength of the support. Through such a multiple step scheme, the approximate proportion of political party supporters among the Hong Kong electorate in the first two legislative elections held respectively in 1991 and 1995 can be estimated. Thus, the scheme can be a feasible one to substitute political party identification for the sake of gauging and measuring the relationship between voters and paties in the early stage of electoral development in a particular territory.

Keywords

Party identification

Party support

Vote choice

Electoral system

Hong Kong elections