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Abstract
The purpose of this article is to discuss whether the evaluation of economic condition in electorate influences the voting choice. The election in Taiwan, with the bad economic condition, do the economic voting exist? When the electorate evaluate that the economic performance is bad, will they punish the ruling party by their votes? We will discuss the relation between the evaluation of economic conditions and voting choices, attributive theory and the heterogeneity of economic voting. From the discovery of this article, there is obvious difference between personal and national evaluation of economic conditions and voting choices. In the multinomial voting model, the economic evaluation that affects the voting choices is not the main factor. Therefore, by using attributive theory and sample choosing, I find some electorate who has the economic voting character. But in the testing of the heterogeneity of economic voting, political trust and the national economic evaluation don't exist the interaction. The effect of economic evaluation to the voting decision doesn't be affected by political trust. We can know that there is heterogeneity in the economic voting of Taiwan electorate. However, what kind of variable causes the effect is the main continuous issue.
Abstract
This paper applies the economic voting theory to analyze the county magistrates and city mayors elections in Taiwan and uses a county-and city- level pooling data from 1989 to 2001 to examine the possible factors which cause the party rotation of the county magistrates and city mayors elections. After estimating Probit model, the primary finding is that the local unemployment rates have no impact on election outcomes of the county magistrates and city mayors. Instead, the national unemployment rates have a significant effect on election outcomes. Generally, the probabilities of party rotation of the counties and cities ruled by the president's party are lower than others. However, this advantage will be damaged as the national unemployment rate is higher in the election year than that in the previous year. Additionally, the incumbents are more likely to defeat the challengers and renew their term of office. Finally, the longer the governing party rules the county or city, the higher the probability of party rotation for this county or city.
Abstract
This article examines across-strait trade openness and vote choices in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections. We first demonstrate two trends about economic assessments in the 2008 and 2012 elections. First, more and more people consider the economic effect of economic openness as neutral. Next, respondents decouple their assessments in the aggregate level and family level. While a substantial percentage of voters still think that economic openness has been bringing about economic prosperity for Taiwan, it has not done so at the family level. As to the effect of economic assessment, we find that the traditional economic voting battery does not exert comparable effect on voting as economic openness. Next, the socio-tropic assessment of economic openness is relatively more important than the pocket-book assessment. More importantly, we demonstrate how political identities, party identification and unification-independence choice, shape the influence of economic assessment on voting decisions. In general, economic assessments exert greater effects on pan-blue and pro-unification voters, while exert smaller effects on pan-green and pro-independence voters. This pattern is mainly associated with the extent that incoming messages are congruent with voters' existing beliefs.
Abstract
Endogeneity of explanatory variables is a common problem in many areas of social sciences. Ironically, there seems to be a gap between being aware of the problem and knowing how best to handle it. The problem is exacerbated when the outcome variable of interest is categorical and thus non-linear probability models are involved. The study fills the gap by first distinguishing two main sources of endogeneity, including unmeasured confounders (＂latent factors＂) and measured but omitted causes (＂endogenous mediators＂), and then proposing an integrated approach to confront the two problems simultaneously. This strategy generalizes structural equation models to categorical outcome by including a shared latent factor between correlated error terms to tackle unobserved confounders, on the one hand, and extending mediation analysis to deal with potentially endogenous discrete mediators, on the other hand. For illustrative purpose, this proposed modeling strategy is presented with an example of heated debates in economic voting literature concerning the possible endogeneity of voters' economic perceptions.
Abstract
The economic voting model has been established as a paradigm for studying electoral accountability based on past economic performances and future prospects. However, objective economic conditions may be a valence issue, and subjective evaluations of the national economy may still be positional. Recent “revisionist” commentators argue that economic voting is “endogenous” in the sense that partisanship strongly affects, if not distorts, voters’ perceptions of macroeconomic performance. Different responses have been elicited to this “partisan bias” claim, but few directly address the causal effect of partisanship on economic perceptions.
This study examined two competing theories of economic voting through investigating the partisan effects on sociotropic economic perceptions. By designing a narrow-window panel telephone survey conducted before and after the January 2016 presidential election in Taiwan, I constructed a two-way fixed effects (FE) model to test the existence of partisan bias. The estimates provided robust evidence of partisan effects on retrospective and prospective economic assessments. In other words, government party supporters evaluated both past and future economic performance favorably during the pre-election period but became pessimistic after their preferred party lost the election. By contrast, opposition party supporters discredited past economic performances during the government party’s rule and expressed optimistic expectations regarding future economic performances after their preferred party won the election. However, the theoretical and methodological conclusions reached in this study extend beyond the single case of Taiwan’s 2016 presidential election.
