Objectives. This article is a test of general electoral theory in the case of Taiwan's 2008, postreform legislative election. In light of Taiwan's electoral reform, I test several hypotheses related ...to choice in electoral design and winning conditions, effective number of parties, proportionality, and regionalism. Methods. I run a simulation of the new rules and districting using the previous (2004) election results and compare this to the actual results. By comparing simulated and actual outcomes, I can compare theoretically-driven, a priori expectations with election outcomes. Results. Primary findings are that a dominant seat share for the Nationalist Party, decline in third-party representation, and disproportionality were largely predicated on the transition to a majoritarian system. Conclusion. General electoral theory holds robust predictive power in the case of Taiwan.
During the five democratic elections held in Taiwan from 1992 to 2004 inclusive, the formerly dominant Kuomintang Party (KMT) was temporarily supplanted by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) as ...the nation's largest political party. Most explanations for this have focused on party fragmentation and the changing patterns of electoral competition it helped create. These are important factors, but they have not been tested empirically at the level where candidates won and lost legislative seats, the level of the election district. This article offers such an empirical test, and it will show that these two factors had a direct impact on the ability of DPP and KMT candidates to obtain legislative seats. We also show that these factors carried indirect impacts by hurting the ability of the KMT and DPP to nominate in a way that they would obtain all the seats that their obtained vote shares would allow.
Institutionalized parties and party systems have traditionally been viewed as necessary conditions for democracies to function effectively. Although this area of research is germane to all ...democracies, most analyses have been divided by regional investigation. Seeking to bridge the gap, this article applies concepts and measures of institutionalization from the study of Latin America to Pacific Asia's two most prominent cases of democratic transition, South Korea and Taiwan. An effort is made to apply the approaches of Dix and Mainwaring and Scully on party and system institutionalization in Latin America to South Korea and Taiwan. Cross-national comparison reveals a curvilinear relationship between institutionalization and consolidation. Taiwan's path to consolidation has been predicated on a pattern very similar to those taken by Latin American cases, whereas South Korea, theoretically, should not be as close to consolidation as it is.
The purpose of this paper is to track changes in the relationship between identity (national and ethnic) and party identification and vote for presidential tickets using the 2004, 2008, and 2012 ..."Taiwan's Elections and Democratization Studies" (TEDS) presidential election surveys. Through this, we may update our knowledge about the changing prevalence of identity issues in the minds of a sample of voters and how this correlates with partisan identification and voting behavior. This paper utilizes the 2004, 2008, and 2012 Taiwan Election and Democratization Study (TEDS) presidential election surveys to test the associations between identity, party leaning, and voting. In this pursuit, we create an "identity profile" of respondents and track the party leaning and voting behavior of each profile over three elections. We find that Democratic Progressive Party support has been largely compressed into the traditional "green" profile. Conversely, support of the Chinese Nationalist Party not only comes from the expected "blue" profile voters, but has transcended this divide and increasingly attracts support from the "green" voter profile.
While Taiwan continues to enjoy a liberal, consolidated democratic regime, citizen discontent continues to be directed at regime, government, and the governing. Identifying the scope and degree of ...dissatisfaction is an initial step in ascertaining whether discontented citizens might be more or less amenable to destabilizing change at the regime level or more procedural changes at the government levels. Taiwan's 2004 elections topped off four years of mud slinging, legislative gridlock, and a number of serious battles over constitutional jurisdictions and powers. This research note compares survey items from the Taiwan Election and Democratization Study (TEDS) surveys taken in 2001 and 2003 to measure levels of support for a democratic regime and governance within this environment. As party and ethnic identification are key cleavages on Taiwan, this study seeks to establish the relative strengths of the association between partisan and ethnic identification and attitudes towards regime and government. The main findings are: (1) dissatisfaction with regime and governance are more strongly associated with partisan identification than ethnic identification; (2) there exists a surprisingly low satisfaction and commitment to democracy; and (3) alienation from government exists at a moderate level.
Parties instrumentally shape or realign electoral support in competitive elections to underpin a vigorous party system. Assessing whether parties are strategic versus ignorant, then, is essential to ...the viability of the parties and particularly relevant in emergent democracies to eliminate unfounded biases against ignorant parties. The dramatic, lopsided results of Taiwan's 2008 legislative elections following electoral reform are particular useful in this regard: they suggest that the Kuomintang's Pan Blue coalition was strategic while the Democratic Progressive Party's Pan Green coalition failed to be strategic. We contradict this, using simulated electoral results and a strategic interaction model. This paper makes three contributions: first, it adds to a limited literature that considers parties influence, particularly parties' strategic actions. Party-centric explanations are rare so that when results are highly disproportionate, the question of whether party choices are strategic versus ignorant adds an important dimension to clarifying how the party realigns electoral support or influences political development. Second, through multiple methodologies - simulated electoral results, a game-theory strategic interaction model, and reports on-the-ground in Taiwan - the results show that parties' expectation of the other camp's strategy informed party choices, i.e., parties were strategic. Third, in revealing how parties were strategic, the paper reveals the basis of continued vitality of parties in Taiwan and other emergent democracies to broaden treatments in assessing party viability.
With the 'third wave of democratization', South Korea joined the democracy club in the late 1980s. Although electoral performance and the party system have changed since the transition to democracy, ...there has been little systematic examination of the changes. In this article, we conduct an empirical test after developing a theoretical argument about why democratization leads to change. Before democratization, the manipulation of electoral laws and the urban–rural cleavage dominated Korean elections. After democratization, the electoral rules stabilized and opposition parties were given a fair chance to win the election. However, the average life of political parties shortened because of regionalism and personalism. There is now reason to believe that personalism may be set to diminish, thus encouraging authentic structural cleavages to emerge and shape Korean party politics in the coming years.
