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Abstract

“Running for an office while holding another position” is common in Taiwanese elections, where incumbent politicians often engage in another campaign before the end of their term, aiming for higher-level political positions. This phenomenon has been discussed in several elections, sparking much debate during the campaigns. There are numerous studies focusing on the political promotion from the perspective of candidates, such as the promotion opportunities within the political structure and candidate campaign strategies. However, there are few studies that approach the issue from the perspective of voters, exploring how voters perceive the behavior of candidates who “run for office while holding another position.” This study selects three legislative elections from 2012 to 2020 as the observation targets and employs an experimental method of “conjoint analysis” through an online survey to analyze whether voters accept the behavior of politicians seeking upward promotion under different conditions. The results indicate that although the public generally holds negative views toward “running for office while holding another position,” it becomes an advantageous condition for candidates when considering various backgrounds of candidates. Compared to candidates without incumbent positions, respondents still prefer candidates with incumbent legislative status. This suggests that although “running for office while holding another position” is negative label to candidates, it still represents that candidates possess a certain level of political experience. The positive effects of latter outweigh the negative effects of the former for voters.

Keywords

conjoint analyze
candidate evaluation
political promotion
voting behavior

Abstract

This paper examines the importance of candidate images and candidate's ability in dealing with national issues in presidential elections of 1996 by using survey research data of Election Study Center at National Chengchi University. The results indicated that the incumbent President Lee Teng-hui was ranked the highest among four presidential candidates in terms of voters assessment of candidate personal qualities and candidate's ability to deal with national problems. Lee Teng-hui complex was the most important factor in determining voter's evaluation of candidates' personal qualities and ability in dealing with national issues, except for Peng Ming-min. But Lee Teng-hui complex has no direct influence on vote-choice, it only translated indirect influence through candidate images. Candidate images turned out to be the most important factor in deciding presidential election result. Attitude toward parties and party preferences ranked the next, except Chen Li-an, who was an indepen-dent candidate with no party support.

Keywords

Candidate images
Candidate personal qualities
Candidate evaluation
Candidate capability
Lee teng-hui complex

Abstract

Accurate forecast of elections is an exciting challenge for every student of electoral behavior. The aim of this article is to apply a model developed by Kelley and Mirer (1974) to the forecast of elections in Taiwan. Three models -- a "revised Kelley & Mirer model," "Candidate-oriented model," and "party-oriented model" are tested by applying data collected by the Election Study Center at the Chengchi University in three different elections. The tests indicate that the revised model is not as powerful as the author expected. Performance of other two models are not stable either. These results imply that in forecasting election we need not only individual level data, we also need to examine the macro environmental factors before we pick an appropriate model for the job.

Keywords

Forecast of elections
Candidate evaluation
Party identification

Abstract

The gubernatorial election in 1994 was the first popularly governor election in Taiwan history. My intention here is to examine turnout in the gubernatorial and presidential elections and to explain how people decide to vote in single-member district. What my findings suggest is that social networks and candidate evaluations largely mobilize voters. Citizen duty is not as influential as partisanship in structuring people's turnout decision. In the presidential election, however, only candidate evaluations affects turnout. The turnout decision in Taiwan hinges on self -interest and social mobilization instead of political attitudes. These findings, which of course require further investigation, shed some lights on the influence of social networks in Taiwan, and reveal the importance of candidate evaluations in terms of turnout in single-member district election.

Keywords

social networks
partisanship
candidate evaluations
turnout
single-member district

Abstract

Since the direct presidential election was held in Taiwan 12 years ago, for the first time a significant voting gender gap appeared in the 2008 presidential election. Women voters supported candidate Ma which boosted him winning the president election. This study attempts to explore why there was such a substantial gender gap in that election. To explain the gender gap, we first compared the factors in explaining voting decision-candidate evaluation, issue positions, socioeconomic factors, and party identification, to see if gender gap exists in these factors. Furthermore, we applied the logit models to examine whether gender differences in these factors lead to voting gender gap. The models show that although gender gaps were evident on voters' candidate evaluation, party identification, some issue positions and socioeconomic conditions, not all of these differences translated into voting gender gaps. Gender differences in party identification remained the strongest factor in explaining gender difference in voting choices. Comparatively, the voting gender gap caused by party identification is evident in that women were less likely to identify with pan-Green party, and pan-Green women might vote across their party line. We further examine respectively the interaction between voters' party identification and candidate factor, and the interaction between voters' party identification and issue evaluation. The results show that candidate factor is not the underlying factor linking the gender gap in party identification and voting gender gap. But the distance of issue positions between voters and parties/candidates on social welfare and environment might explain why women voters identify differently from men with parties and how these differences transfer into voting gender gaps.

Keywords

gender gap
Ma's effect
party identification
issue position
candidate evaluation

Abstract

The political context to which the electorate is exposed is filled with a variety of political information and becomes more and more competitive during political campaigns. This seems to mean that a given campaign facilitates the electorate to create for itself clearer and more drastic political preference based on party identification up to voting day. The author utilizes the pre-election survey data from rolling cross-sectional telephone interviews during the 2012 Taiwan’s presidential election to detect the influence of party identification on candidate evaluation during the political campaign. It was found that the electorate had a significantly clear preference between the main candidates up to voting day, especially for the more involved voters. Furthermore, the correlations between voters’ party identification and its political attitudes including candidate evaluation and government performance become increasingly tighter as voting day approaches. In conclusion, this study proves the reinforcement of the party identification effect during political campaigns and suggests that it would be worthy to investigate it in a different political context in the future.

Keywords

political campaign
candidate evaluation
party identification