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Abstract

Keywords

Selection bias
Vote
Vote choice models

Abstract

This article attempts to show that the social factor: the effect of social network is discernible and important in the 1989 Legislative Yuan election of Taipei City South district. Traditionally, analysis of Taiwanese voting behavior focused on the psychological factor. Party identification which shed light on the stability of voting behavior was often highly emphasized. By inspecting the interviweds' frequency of contacting and discussing with their friends or neighbors, it is ident-ified three locations in the social network. In the analysis of electorate's demographic characteristics and their political involve-ment as well as knowledge. It is found that a vertical association of mobilization exists between the three locations. Party identification dominates in the process of vote desicion, however, the vertical associ-ation help determine the formation of party preference. This paper explains how the social network influence the elector-ate, by observing the party preference volatility in the Taipei City South District. It is concluded that a part of electorate, who has not strong party preference, is changing their preference while old social network was replacing by new media and taking over by astute elite.

Keywords

Social network
Canvass
Vote choice
Party system

Abstract

The conventional approach of measuring party identification is applicable to political systems in which (1) the electoral competition is mainly between two major parties, (2) both parties are established and entrenched, (3) the electoral system is stable. To gauge party identification in a multi-party setting or in an early stage of election and party development, a modified and novel scheme is required. This article takes the vote choice as the starting point to gauge the sentiment of support among the Hong Kong electorate towards the political parties. An elector's vote choice is cross-checked by a number of other factors in order to ascertain the strength of the support. Through such a multiple step scheme, the approximate proportion of political party supporters among the Hong Kong electorate in the first two legislative elections held respectively in 1991 and 1995 can be estimated. Thus, the scheme can be a feasible one to substitute political party identification for the sake of gauging and measuring the relationship between voters and paties in the early stage of electoral development in a particular territory.

Keywords

Party identification
Party support
Vote choice
Electoral system
Hong Kong elections

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