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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
The democratic value of the people has key influence on the quality of democracy in a country, the level of political trust of the people also influences the legitimacy of the regime. This article focuses on the democratic value and political trust of Taiwanese people, placing emphasis on the changing pattern before and after the alternation of power. We first look at the attitude changes in these issues over time, then examine the factors influencing the attitude changes before and after the alternation of power. We found there is still room for improvements on these political attitudes. Taiwanese people's democratic values ranking from high to low by order are principles of equality, political participation, freedom, check and balance, and diversity. After the alternation of power, eight out of ten principles showed a tendency of deterioration. On political trust, people's trust level from high to low by order are 'consider people's welfare, 'trust toward leaders,' 'ablitity on planning,' 'making the right decision,' 'wasting tax money,' 'integrity of politicians.' After the alternation of power, there are increased trust on the policy making dimension, but decreased trust on both credibility and integrity dimensions. On factors influencing these attitudes changes, ethnic background played only limited role but partisanship has a rather large influence, especially on the political trust level. Finally, we discuss the problem of validity of these questionnaires.
Abstract
The news has softened in Taiwan as well as in most of the democratic societies. While people prefer more entertainment-related information on the media, scholars started worrying about the impact of soft news preference on voters' political knowledge. The purpose of this paper is to examine Taiwanese voters news preferences (hard/soft news) and how that related to their democratic values, political knowledge and voting. The results had found that people in Taiwan prefer reading soft news on newspaper and television. Age and education were the best variables predicting Taiwanese democratic values. Male, highly educated, read more newspapers, prefer hard news on the media, had higher democratic values, showed more factual knowledge toward politics. While there's no significant relationship between democratic values and people's voting on presidential election, their democratic values did significantly relate to their voting in 2004 Legislative election.
