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Abstract

Free and fair election is the core of democracy. Regular election in turn is the most important vehicle for the electorate to hold the ruling party and government accountable. This paper, based on theoretical arguments, elaborates the effects of government performance at different levels of elections. We argue that the higher the level of elections, the higher the level of government is held accountable by the electorate, while at the bottom local level elections, only the local government performance matters. In the county magistrate's election, the central government's performance should play a more important role on voter choice. By contrast, in the township magistrate's election, the local government's performance should have greater effects on voter choice. We test this proposition with the case of Yunlin in the 2009 county and township magistrates' elections with the survey data collected by the Taiwan's Election and Democratization Study (TEDS) project. We find that indeed voter choice in county magistrate's election is significantly affected by both central and county government's performance. However, neither central nor local government performance has significant effect on voter choice in township magistrates' election. This finding may reflect the fact that bottom-level local elections relies more on social networks and local factions than on government policy evaluation.

Keywords

government performance
vote choice
local elections

Abstract

There are reasons to believe that both partisan and personal factors should be important in the voting decision in SNTV elections, but this has not been rigorously tested in previous literature. This paper presents evidence that both types of factors have significant impacts, but partisan factors are much more powerful than personal factors. In general, partisan factors dominate the candidate vote choice, and personal factors serve primarily as tiebreakers among candidates from the same party. Moreover, the importance that voters place on personal factors varies in different partisan contexts, and there is generally a partisan logic to these varying weights.Methodologically, this paper proposes mixed logit as an appropriate tool for modeling voting choices in SNTV and examines data from the five legislative elections in Taiwan from 1992 to 2004.

Keywords

Single non-transferable vote (SNTV)
mixed logit
vote choice

Abstract

Recent political protests led by young people in Taiwan appear to reflect a strong sense of attachment to their identity as Taiwanese. Employing survey data collected for the 2016 presidential election, this study confirms that Taiwanese identity continues to grow among the island citizens, particularly among the younger generations. While identity exerts a powerful effect on how people vote, there is also a visible generational gap. Members of the younger generations are less likely to be affected by their Taiwanese identity than older ones.

Keywords

political generation
national identity
vote choice
party identification