Although public opinion in Taiwan is increasingly in favor of gay rights, there is no corresponding trend at the elite level and no concrete policy changes have been achieved. Based on the logic of electoral competition and political socialization, this paper takes the 2014 elections for municipal councilors in Taiwan as an example and examines the factors influencing support for LGBT equality among local politicians. Theoretically, although the centrifugal effect of the SNTV system motivates candidates of the same party to differ from each other on a variety of issues, political socialization, on the contrary, encourages a more unified issue stance taken among party members. The results of multilevel models suggest that there is little linkage between the characteristics of constituents, the electoral rule, and candidates’ stances on gay rights. However, both partisanship and age play an indispensable role. Candidates who are members of the DPP or one of the liberal parties are more likely to support LGBT rights than their KMT counterparts.

In nation-wide local elections held on November 29, 2014, the Kuomintang (KMT) suffered its worst defeat in the post-war history of local elections in Taiwan. The party saw its control of the country’s 22 local executive posts dwindle from 15 to only 6. Most notable among the KMT’s setbacks was its mayoral election defeat in the Taipei City, which had been run by a KMT mayor for 16 years. Ko Wen-je, an independent who ran under the banner of a “grand opposition alliance,” defeated KMT candidate Sean Lien by nearly 250,000 votes. The KMT’s post-election review report pointed to spill-over effects from the Taipei election to other local contests as one of the reasons for its crushing defeat nation-wide.

Did the “Ko Wen-je phenomenon” truly produce such spill-over effects? This study looks at the Hsinchu City mayoral election, using various empirical data to assess potential spill-over effects from Ko’s Taipei candidacy to that of DPP Hsinchu City mayoral candidate Lin Chi-jian. Hierarachical non-linear modeling is applied to analyze a combination of individual-level and macro-level data. The data analysis shows that with respect to individual-level variables, voters’ preference for Lin Chi-jian, party-orientation, and age clearly influenced the level of support for Lin’s candidacy. At the macro-level, support for Lin was positively correlated with Ko Wen-je’s level of support and media exposure as well as positive commentary on Ko’s candidacy on television news programs. The results of the study confirm the existence of coattail effects of the Ko Wen-je phenomenon in Taiwan’s 2014 local elections.