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Abstract
This paper employs qualitative data collected through focus group and in-depth interviews during the period of 2000-2021. The proposed research aims to explore how Taiwanese people define and interpret “Taiwanese”, “Chinese” and “both Taiwanese and Chinese (dual identities)”, and also to clarify people’s identity target and boundary. The result shows that Taiwanese people’s identity contents are continuous and concentrated in the Taiwan- centered “we group” consciousness. The primordialist ties with China persists, yet most of them are regarded as objective facts and cannot be generated or converted into the “we group” consciousness. The major change is that the Chinese consciousness has almost disappeared from popular discourse. Our data also shows that many Taiwanese people have treated Taiwan (Republic of China) as the “we group”, and China (People’s Republic of China) as the “they group”. This finding indicates that Taiwan identity has reached the stage of national identity in terms of boundary setting. The gradual clarity and elevationed consciousness of national identity impliesy that Taiwan has the tendency of reaching a collective identity.
Abstract
The Taiwan Provincial Council is the subject of this study. Based on the KMT's nomination strategy and election results in the two provincial councilor elections in 1972 and 1977, it revisits and revises the KMT's factional substitution policy of the 1970s. During the 1972 local elections, the KMT aggressively promoted factional replacement in the election of magistrates, mayors, and Taiwan Provincial Councilors. The KMT eliminated political figures with local factional backgrounds on a large scale in the name of promoting young talents. With respect to the Taiwan Provincial Councilors, the replacement was intended to eliminate Taiwan Provincial Councilors elected prior to 1968 in order to suppress the inter-county local faction that existed in the Taiwan Provincial Council at the time. Most Taiwan Provincial Councilors who had served for more than two terms were not re-elected, thereby generating a significant generational shift in the makeup of Taiwan Provincial Council. The KMT’s control over the Taiwan Provincial Council was thus strengthened. Despite a significant reduction in mobilization power due to the KMT's suppression of local factions, the party's political base was unaffected by the absence of a strong national opposition at the time. During the 1977 local elections, the KMT continued to suppress local factions while giving support to KMT members who had no factional background. The local factions were no longer as effective as they had been during the local elections in 1972. Except for a few counties and cities, no local factions abandoned the KMT, and their capacity for mobilization improved. However, factions outside the party successfully mobilized over 7% of new voters who had not voted previously. This resulted in unprecedented setbacks for the KMT, including the defeat of several Taiwan provincial councilors from local factions. Taiwan has since formed an opposition capable of mobilizing the entire country.
Abstract
The bitter rivalries that used to occur only among political elites have now reached the everyday lives of the mass public. In particular, the results of presidential elections have been driven as much by affective conflict between partisans as by policy debates. The present study explores affective polarization in Taiwan through negative partisanship. Data from presidential elections between 2004 and 2020 provide evidence for the effect of negative partisanship on election results. The study found that starting in 2012, there has been a rapid increase in negative views among partisans in both main parties toward the opposing party. In the 2020 presidential election, more than 40% of both Kuomintang (KMT) and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) supporters showed negative partisanship towards the opposing party. Furthermore, supporters of both parties had the lowest ever favorability scores for the opposing party. Even when traditional party identification and support for independence or reunification are controlled, negative partisanship still has significant explanatory power. The decision to vote for a candidate from a particular party in presidential elections depends not only on one’s long-term identification with that party but also on whether one harbors a strong negative opinion towards the opposing party.
Abstract
This explorative study employs a large-scale analysis of individual turnout data from the 2016 and 2020 presidential and legislative elections, alongside the 2018 local elections and referenda in Taiwan, to advance our understanding of Indigenous voting behaviour in three ways. Firstly, we challenge the conventional wisdom that Indigenous voters exhibit lower turnout rates compared to the non-Indigenous electorate. Secondly, we further compare turnout differences among Highland and Lowland voters. Lastly, we analyse turnout variations across different types of ballots: national and local elections and referendum
bills. Contrary to prevailing international and domestic norms, we provide strong empirical evidence that Indigenous voters are diverse and dynamic in their voting behaviours, and this diversity extends not only in comparison to the Han voters but also within the Indigenous population, interacting with the different types of elections.
Abstract
This essay attempts first to re-conceptualize public's deep-seated am-bivalent feelings, thoughts and perceptions about the first Taiwanese President Lee as 'Lee Teng-hui complex' by refering the concept 'complex' back to analytical psychologist Carl Jung's original usage. Sec-ond, in the our empirical analysis Lee Teng-hui complex is then operationalized and measured as individual's positive-negative affect responses that taken to be off the top of the head while confronting in-formation related to President Lee. As shown in our multivariate analy-sis of electoral survey data, individual's ethnicity, education, and parti-sanship are significant predictors of Lee Teng-hui complex. Moreover, same as that of Taiwanese vs. mainlanders, KMT and NP identifiers are also found polarized in the measure of Lee Teng-hui complex. Among direct determinants of individual's partisan vote-choices, Lee Teng-hui complex is found only marginally significant, however, it is a major intervening variable in shaping individual's evaluation of candidates, issues and parties that lead to the final vote-choice making in both the 1994 Taiwan's Gubernatorial and Taipei Mayoral elections. This essay concludes that individual's ambivalent affect toward President Lee, com-monly termed 'Lee Teng-hui complex' in public discourse, has indeed served as the catalyst for the forming of the splinter New Party on the one hand, and it has only hollo-effect functioning as indirect factor in shaping individual's partisan vote-choices on the other.
Abstract
The influence of partisan factor in electoral choice under the SNTV system has not been well understood and systematically studies in the past. Conventional wisdom suggests that an SNTV system tends to induce candidate-centered campaign and to suppress the importance of partisan consideration. The paper argues that partisan factor may be brought into voters' decision-making in many different ways. In some cases, it serves as a screening factor, in other cases, it is the dominant factor as voters are willing to follow their party's instruction under a vote-eqalizing scheme. This paper identifies four different modes of electoral choice according to the impact of partisan factor on voting behavior. The analytical framework is a preliminary trial based on the islandwide survey data of the 1991 election for the National Assembly.
Abstract
This paper examines the nature and its correlated characteris-tics of what has been popularly termed "Lee Teng-hui complex" in Taiwan's political discourse in the 1990s by an analysis of available post-electoral survey data sets collected between 1994 and 1996. As measured by a set political affect toward President Lee Teng-hui, our findings show that Lee Teng-hui complex is a kind of stable mass political psyche mainly reflecting a pride of being Taiwanese as well as Chinese. Moreover, Lee Teng-hui complex is ascer-tained to be a syndrome as it is found to have significant and posi-tive correlation with two sets of polarized and negatively related po-litical attitudes that taping so-called "Taiwan mind" and "China con-cerns" respectively at the same time. A conjecture in electoral campaign that ascribes Taiwanese' s Lee Teng-hui complex as a psy-chological foundation in supporting Taiwan independence is there-fore empirically ungrounded with the available data, given that Lee Teng-hui is the first and foremost Taiwanese President. Thirdly, ethnicity, Taiwanese pride, China concerns are all found to be sig-nificant predictors of Lee Teng-hui complex, and the causal effects are held consistent against different data sets in point. Finally, with multinomial logit analysis, Lee Teng-hui complex is found as a consistent and significant psychological factor, along with party i-dentification, in directing voter's final vote-choice in recent elec-tions, especially in the presidential election held in 1995 in which in-cumbent President Lee Teng-hui involved.
Abstract
It is well recognized that intra-party competition marks a major consequence of the single nontransferable vote under multi-member district system(SNTV-MMD), currently used in Taiwan's legislature elections. A key issue in Taiwan's electoral study is thus how candi-dates, especially those from the same party, divide their votes a-mong various categories that differentiate the voters. Since the data set revealing this information is usually a large matrix of categorical variables, existing multivariate statistical methods are either inap-plicable or inadequate. This paper demonstrates that correspond-dence analysis is an appropriate statistical tool to solve this prob-lem. This method treats an n × m matrix as n vectors in an m-di-mensional space, and finds a k-dimensional subspace that maxi-mizes the variance of the projections of the n vectors. Utilizing this method, this paper first illustrates the Chi-square distance between candidates and the sub-district regions. It then designs indexes to describe the degree of vote concentration for each candidate, fac-tion, and party, and correlate it with the electoral performances of these actors. Statistical analysis indicates that, given the same vote share, inertia, and dimensionality, overnominating one candidate decreases the seat share of the KMT by 11.73%.
Abstract
In this paper, I use a multinomial logit model to explain how voters decided their votes in the 1996 Presidential election in Tai-wan. Generally, a voter's party identification and evaluation toward three major candidates played important roles on his or her vote choice in this election. The political climate, popularity among the four candidates and the distribution of partisans, favored President Lee Teng-hui. His maintaining economic prosperity and attraction to those middle-of-the-road voters also helped him to win this elec-tion. Both Mr. Peng Ming-min and Lin Yang-kang got their support from those with higher education and with the feeling of the nation-al economy being worse. As to voters' ethnic identity, people iden-tifying themselves as Taiwanese inclined to support Mr. Peng. However, Mr. Lin did not gain advantage from those whom with Chinese identity. On the "social welfare v. economic development" issue, respondents with being closer to "social welfare" stances tend-ed to support Mr. Peng. On the "reform v. status quo" issue, Mr. Peng's supporters came from those whose stances being closer to "reform."
Abstract
The present study explores whether the geographic distribution of grants among counties and cities, offered by the Taiwan Provincial Government (TPG) from FY1988 to FY1995, is aiming at equalizing local finance or manipulating elections. Specifically, we ask if the size of grants during the election years is larger than non-election years? We also ask whether the decision regarding the distribution of grants made by the Taiwan Provincial Government is contingent upon the consideration of electoral success of the ruling party KMT? That is, under the command of the ruling party KMT, does the TPG offer disproportionate grants to the most vulnerable districts regardless of the objective needs?Briefly, statistical results show that the size of provincial grants during the election years is larger than non-election years. The results also show that the disproportionate provincial grants do flow to KMT's vulnerable districts in the election of the Taiwan Provincial Legislators and the election of county in chief and city mayor, but not in the election of Lawmakers of the Legislative Yuan. These findings suggest that, in addition to maintaining the KMT's partisan advantaged position, the TPG distributes disproportionate benefits to vulnerable districts based on political considerations of its own. First, the budget security of the TPG is dependent on the Taiwan Provincial Legislators. Thus, helping candidates of provincial legislators who are most vulnerable to be elected or reelected by distributing provincial grants to his or her districts may exchange future support of provincial legislators. Second, the TPG needs the cooperation of city government and county government in policy implementation. Hence, the TPG expect to bring partnership of local governments in the future if the TPG offers assistant expenditures for those incumbents of city mayor or county in chief who are most vulnerable in the election.Finally, although we find clear evidences of political manipulation in the distribution of Taiwan provincial grants, the objective criteria-capacity of self-financing still plays an important role in the decision of grant distribution. We find that the counties or cities with low capacity of self-financing receive more grants than those with high capacity of self-financing. In other words, electoral consideration may exist in the distribution of provincial grants, yet equalizing local finance is still not ignored in the decision process.
Abstract
The purpose of this research is to examine how the issue Taiwan independence versus unification with the Mainland (hereinafter the TI-UM issue) affects Taiwan's politics through elections in the 1990s. To achieve this purpose, this article deals with three major issues. The first is to show how the TI-UM issue emerges and evolves in Taiwan's political arena. The second is to show how voters' position on the TI-UM issue affects their voting behavior, and how these effects differ across different elections. The third is to show what the determinants are and how the determinants affect voters' position on the TI-UM issue. This research focuses on five elections across different periods of time. They are gubernatorial and mayoral elections in 1994, legislator's elections in 1995 and 1998, and presidential elections in 1996 and 2000. The data used in this research are the post-election face-to-face interviews conducted by the Election Study Center in National Chengchi University.
Abstract
The major purpose of this article is to search for the political cleavages which shaping the party competition in Taiwan in the 2001 legislative Yuan election. We establish four criteria for an issue to be political cleavage. First, most people perceive the issue and are able to put themselves and the major parties on the continuum based on the issue. Second, most people perceive that major parties take different positions on the issue. If most parties take the same position on the issue, the issue cannot be a salient political cleavage. Third, most people take the position on the issue according to their social characteristics. In other words, most people consider the situations of themselves and their groups so as to take particular positions, rather than take positions randomly. Fourth, most people identify a party or vote for a party according to the positions the party takes on the issues. The research findings show that the ethnic differences, national identity and authoritarian /democratic values are the most important political cleavages, and have considerable impacts on party competition. The reformation/stability issue has some impacts, and is the second most important political cleavage. However, the social welfare issue and environmental protection/economic development issue are still not so salient in Taiwan.
Abstract
“Taiwan vs. China” complex has been taken as the major factor that draws partisan line between parties along the “Taiwan-independence and China-unification” stance on the one hand and influences vote-choice among Taiwanese and Mainlanders on the other. Yet, this linkage has not been explored empirically as far. According to symbolic politics theory, Taiwanese vote-choices are influenced more by political affect than self-interest. The paper argues that those political affect components, as shown either in determining individual’s vote-choices or in party’s strategy of electoral mobilization, can be effectively channeled down to this “Taiwan vs. China” complex. The paper recasts this culturally deep-seated concept by looking at its derivative psycho-political orientations, so-called “Taiwan vs. China” concern, which is measured by a cluster of affective-driven beliefs in Taiwan’s supremacy and/or concerns for China. Based on an analysis of post-electoral survey data of the 1998 and 2001 legislative elections, two-factor structure is found in the “Taiwan vs. China” concerns, and this polarized affect orientation serves as a link to relate socio-demographic characteristics to ethnic identification, national identity, party identification, independence-unification stance as well as to partisan vote-choice. Symbolic politics in Taiwan’s election is thus confirmed by individual’s affect-driven vote-choices. In sum, the paper concludes that the empirical import of “Taiwan-China complex” concept can be identified as two groups of political affect components around “Taiwan vs. China” concerns in a two second-order factor analysis.
Abstract
As Abramson (1983: 135) noted: Next to party identification, no political attitude has been studied more extensively than feelings of political effectiveness. In this study, I employ longitudinal data to explore the political efficacy in Taiwan, placing emphasis on the changing pattern, and demonstrate the factors influencing this attitude from 1998 to 2003, before and after the alternation of power. From our findings, first, we showed the distribution of Taiwanese political efficacy. The internal efficacy was relatively stable for this period, but the decreasing trend has appeared. On the other hand, the external efficacy increased after the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) won the 2000 presidential election. It means that the feelings of government responsiveness grow up after the alternation of ruling party in Taiwan. However, the decline of internal efficacy has shown that the mass public still think the politics was too complicated to understand. Second, I demonstrate some factors influencing the internal efficacy and external efficacy. The former indicated the political orientation of personal political competence for long terms. The Empirical result showed that the affected factors and coefficient direction were relatively similar over time. The latter, however, was influenced by social groups, included the ethnic backgrounds, party identification and the independence/unification issue positions. In addition, we tried to explain the theorical linkage between internal efficacy and external efficacy. That provides some possible suggestions in future studies.
Abstract
Is it the ideology affiliated with ex-president Lee Teng-hui or the traditional local political factions that consist of the bases of Taiwan Solidarity Union's support? Our study finds that the later plays more important role than the former does. The study derives three indicators using village vote counts from the 2001 and some from 1995 and 1998 legislative election records, the first. is a Gini-coefficient type indicator showing the extent of candidate's vote dispersion pattern; the second uses votes from only a portion of total villages, from top down 10%, 20% and from bottom up 10%, 20% to show the distribution of candidate's strength and weakness; the third uses the overlapping percentage of candidate's top 5% vote-getting villages during 1995, 1998 and 2001 elections to examine candidate's steady strength before and after the Lee Teng-hui affiliation. The article also discusses the campaign strategies employed by the TSU for maximizing her political strength under the SNTV electoral system in Taiwan.
Abstract
Based on the analysis of survey data collected on the eve of Taiwan's 2008 presidential election, our study seeks to clarify the effects of the following factors on the island citizens' voting behavior: (1)Taiwanese identity, (2)expected benefits from cross-Strait economic exchanges, and (3)the perceived likelihood of China's use of military force. The findings show that, in addition to party identification, both Taiwanese identity and expected economic benefits have important effects on the islanders' vote choices. Unexpectedly, China's military threats played an insignificant role in voters' decisions. Because Taiwanese identity and expected economic benefits are at the center of the political discourse on cross-Strait relations, future interactions between Taiwan and China will continue to play a significant role in the island's politics.
Abstract
Ethnic and identity problems are important issues in modern Taiwanese politics. This paper examines Taiwanese identity from the aspect of ethnic and identity theory. The author develops a ”Taiwanese consciousness” index to explore the effect of identity in the past four presidential elections. The results show that Taiwanese consciousness has increased year by year, with more than half (54.7%) of Taiwan voters now classified into the high level of Taiwanese consciousness. The data also show that people with different degrees of Taiwanese consciousness vote differently and are increasingly polarized around identity. People with high-level Taiwanese consciousness tend to vote for pan-green candidates, while people with lowlevel Taiwanese consciousness tend to vote for pan-blue candidates. The data also indicate that the support bases of different parties are quite different. Votes for pan-green candidates mostly come from people with high-level Taiwanese consciousness, and this fraction has steadily increased; at the same time, support for pan-blue candidates has fallen significantly among this group. The analysis shows that partisan identification performs better than the ”Taiwanese consciousness” index at predicting vote choice, but the ”Taiwanese consciousness” index still has additional explanatory power. This paper also finds that the effect of ”sengi” (voters' provincial background) is not significant in the four presidential elections after controlling for other variables. This result suggests that the identity issue in Taiwan is now more an expression of ideological differences than ethnic ones.
Abstract
Mixed or Hybrid electoral system, a combination of single-member district with plurality (SMD) and proportional representation (PR), has drawn a lot of attention from all over the world in the past few years. Recent studies have focused on its characters and classifications, its impact on the diversified social development, the connection with strategic voting behavior, the interaction with the campaign strategy and party competition, and the formulation of new party system. Based on the survey conducted by Japanese Election Study (JES) and Taiwanese Election and Democratization Study (TEDS), we compare the dynamic voting behaviors between Japan and Taiwan, since both of them follow the same routine of electoral transformation from SNTV to Mixed system. The results show there do have some difference, especially the ticket splitting of the two ballots and the voting stability during system transition, between two countries. From the cross sectional data analysis, we find KMT and DPP received more consistent support in two separate ballots, comparing with the major parties in Japan. As for the panel data results, the convergence to major parties is confirmed in both countries while the trend is more obvious in Taiwan once again. In short, we find the small parties in Taiwan have relative little room for competition, comparing with those in Japan, under new Mixed system. The formulation of two party system is quite noticeable in Taiwan.
Abstract
This study examines how Taiwan Television Enterprise reported the campaign and candidates during the 1996, 2000, 2004, and 2008 presidential elections in Taiwan. A content analysis of evening election news of the television company indicated that there were significant quantity bias, source bias, and presentation bias in its coverage of the first three presidential election campaigns. However, the television company was more balanced in its coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign. An in-depth interview of 10 reporters of the television company indicated that ownership structure has direct or indirect influence on election coverage of the television company. The change of ownership of the television company in 2007 has contributed to the achievement of more balanced media coverage in the 2008 presidential election.
Abstract
This paper aims to examine the test-retest reliability of two important political attitudes, i.e. Taiwanese/Chinese identity and issue of Unification/ Independence (UI issue), among the Taiwanese electorate by analyzing the 2004-2008 panel data from the Taiwan Election and Democratization Study. This paper further explores the socio-demographic factors that might affect the consistence of one's Taiwanese/Chinese identity and the position of the issue of Unification/Independence. This paper then examines the relationship between the two political attitudes.The findings suggest that one's Taiwanese/Chinese identity demonstrates higher stability than his/her position on the UI issue. People who identified themselves as Chinese changed to having a ”joint identity”. Those who hold a ”joint identity” have changed to identified themselves as Taiwanese. The factors that affect one's attitude consistency include education, political generation and China experience. Those with less education, the oldest generation and have been to China are more likely to change their attitudes. Moreover, findings from the statistical model show that one's Taiwanese/Chinese identity influences one's position on the UI issue.
