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Abstract
Two major parties in Taiwan,KMT and DPP,have implementedpublic opinion survey as the formal mechanism for their candidate selections.The employment of public opinion survey in the process of candidate selection is based on two hypotheses:(1)the usage of opinion surveymay narrow down the gap between the”party will”and the”public opinion”,(2)the usage of opinion survey may reduce the influence of”nominalparty members”.This paper examines the candidate selection process ofDPP in 1998 Legislative Yuan Election,and demonstrates that none ofthe hypotheses above are true.Moreover,when the public opinion surveywas applied for the candidate selection,the most important function ofthe political party will be shrunk.
Abstract
The news has softened in Taiwan as well as in most of the democratic societies. While people prefer more entertainment-related information on the media, scholars started worrying about the impact of soft news preference on voters' political knowledge. The purpose of this paper is to examine Taiwanese voters news preferences (hard/soft news) and how that related to their democratic values, political knowledge and voting. The results had found that people in Taiwan prefer reading soft news on newspaper and television. Age and education were the best variables predicting Taiwanese democratic values. Male, highly educated, read more newspapers, prefer hard news on the media, had higher democratic values, showed more factual knowledge toward politics. While there's no significant relationship between democratic values and people's voting on presidential election, their democratic values did significantly relate to their voting in 2004 Legislative election.
Abstract
Taiwan has adopted a new mixed member system which carries significant differences from the long-implemented SNTV-MMD system for the election of legislators in 2008. Mainstream literature continues to discuss the electoral impacts on political parties and candidates by the new system while citizen's knowledge of the new system and its concomitant effects on citizen's behavior are less concerned. The purpose of this essay is to explore citizen's perceptions, participations and evaluations of this new system. Based on a 30-day rolling poll data, it firstly examines the distribution and change of citizen's knowledge of the new electoral system. It finds that citizen's knowledge of the new electoral system is not high. Also, citizen's knowledge is increased as election approaches when more campaign information is provided. It is followed by a discussion that citizen's age, education, media exposure, political interests, and party identification are closely associated with citizen's increase of knowledge. Then, by way of analyzing post election panel survey data, this essay makes clear that an increase of citizen's knowledge also contributes to citizen's intention to vote in election. However, citizen maintains a mixed assessment of the new electoral system that, compared with the SNTV-MMD system, the new electoral system is good for recruiting better candidates and the development of democracy but fears for causing social tensions. It also finds citizen's party identification plays a significant role in the assessment while citizen's knowledge of new system does not. In the discussion and conclusion section, it suggests a cautious perspective that citizen in Taiwan has only one experience of the new system. It is reasonable to argue that citizen's knowledge may increase as more elections are implemented under the new system. Meanwhile, based on the New Zealand experience and findings of this essay, more information of the new system, either from the government, mass media, or political parties, will contribute to citizen's knowledge of new system.
