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Abstract
This study examines how the power relationship within households affects individuals' national identity. Comparing with the past studies which address the collective changes of national identity, this study instead focuses on individual households to explore the malleability of individual national identity changed by marriages. Family power studies have shown that the socioeconomic-resource and gender role differences have great impact upon the power distribution among husbands and wives, this study applies the 1996-2008 cross-sectional data to explore the effect of the gender power within households on individuals' national identity. The results of this investigation show that, individuals' national identity is affected by their spouses' ethnic groupings, and women are more likely than men to be affected by their spouses'. The models show that, on the male part, their identity on Taiwanese/Chinese and pro-independence/unification are significantly affected by their own ethnic backgrounds, party identification, and the year of investigation, these factors also affect women's national identities. However, in contrast to men, women's identity on Taiwanese/ Chinese and pro-independence/unification are greatly affected by their spouses' ethnicities. In terms of the Taiwanese/Chinese identity, women are directly affected by their husbands' ethnicities, regardless of their differences in socio-economic status or political engagements. Relatively, in terms of the pro-independence/unification identity, women are indirectly affected by their husbands' ethnic backgrounds caused by the educational gap. As the wives' education level gets lower, their pro-independence/unification stance is more likely to be affected by their husbands' ethnicities. In short, the gender asymmetries of which wives' identity affected by their husbands' ethnicities are not fixed, rather they are distributed differently across households and varied by identity dimensions.
Abstract
Given that ethnicity and identity are the principal factors of political cleavage in Taiwan, this article explores the following questions: Whether individuals Taiwanese/Chinese identities are influenced by their spouses' ethnic background? If so, whose identities are more likely to be shaped by the intensive interactions between husbands and wives in a marriage? Answers to these questions are helpful to researchers who are interested in assessing the effect of political socialization experiences during adulthood. This article analyzes pooled survey data from Taiwan's Election and Democratization Study and the main findings are: (1) Ethnic background affects the respondents' self-identities. (2) Respondents tend to marry within their ethnic group. (3) Respondents' self-identities are influenced by their spouses' ethnic background. (4) Although females' self-identities are generally affected by their spouses' ethnicity, the best-educated females' self-identities are less likely to be changed after getting married. (5) The best-educated males' self-identities are more likely to be shifted after getting married than their female counterparts.
