home
Home
navigate_next
Search results
Search results
Abstract
Voting tendencies has been the focus of political field.Due to thelimitations of the secretive voting system,the only way to learn each individual'svoting preferences is to take polls.However,the reliability ofthe poll results is questionable.One thing that we can be sure of is thatthe voting results reflect every citizen's decision.It would be a risk of ecologicalfallacy if one hypothesizes the voting attitude based on the votingresult.Based on the voting result in the Taipei election of 1998,first ofall,this thesis gives an analysis of the phenomenon of split-ticket votingbetween political parties in City Mayor and City congress.ApplyingKing's EI model analyzes how citizens chose their desired candidates amongthe three political parties.It also experimentally applies the statisticsmethods to lower the risk of ecological fallacy.So it turns out that asexpected,the supporters of the New Party adapt split-ticket voting byvoting KMT's candidate Mao Ying-jo.The rate of split-ticket votingreaches 98.29%.In addition,split-ticket voting also happens to the supportersof KMT's congress.The voters in split-ticket voting vote forDPP's City Mayor candidate Chen Shuei-Bien.The split-ticket votingrate registers 48.28%.
Abstract
The phenomenon of divided government seemingly has become the institutional norm at the various levels of governments in Taiwan. In view of its theoretically and practically political implications, we focus on the causes of divided government in Taiwan’ s national politics. Put it simply, we examine the contending perspectives: the voters prefer the system of checks and balances by divided partisan control of the executive and legislative branches, and intentionally votes for presidential and congressional candidates of different political parties; or, the electoral choice may have little to do with public preferences for divided or unified government but is heavily influenced by other determinants. We take advantage of the 2001 Taiwan's Election and Democratization Study (TEDS 2001) survey data of the general preference for divided government and examine if vote choice is on the basis of strategic considerations in the 2000 presidential and 2001 Legislative Yuan elections. The findings indicate that the variables of ethnicity, party identification, Taiwanese/Chinese identification, and the cognition for checks and balances emerge as statistically significant for accounting electoral stability/change and for the existence of divided government at the central level.
Abstract
Previous empirical work on political budget cycles focused solely on the dynamics of overall budget, and implicitly assumes the executive has full discretion over fiscal policy. This study goes beyond traditional political budget cycles models and shed light on the case study of 21 local governments in Taiwan over the 1984-2009 periods.To explore how the level of checks and balances can explain the size of the political budget cycles, the political constraints index for the 21 local governments in Taiwan province is developed following the coding procedure of Henisz(2005). The law and order index from the International Country Risk Guide are used to measure compliance with the law. The proxy for effective checks and balances on executive discretionary power over the 1984 to 2009 period are established with the combination of the political constraints index and the law and order index. The impacts of elections, checks and balances on the allocation of local public expenditures over the period of 1984 to 2009 are then explored by using the generalized method of moments developed for dynamic models of the panel data of Taiwan's 21 local governments.The empirical results show that the government would indeed adjust the budget expenditures contents to achieve their goals in the election period. Such as, the deletion of the general government budget expenditures towards the social welfare expenditure budget. By incorporating effective legislative checks and balances into the model, the effect of political budget cycles can indeed be moderated or counteracted. Regardless of whether the local government has discretion or not, it does not affect the checks and balances ability of the legislature.
