Observing the process of the recent elections in Taiwan, we found that different political parties often negotiated with each other for the possibility of cooperation. Each party would decide whether to cooperate or not. This paper develops a three-party game theoretical model of single-seat elections to analyze the conditions under which that minor political party would agree to cooperate with major political parties, and discusses the rationality of decision from each political party. According to the equilibrium results, cooperation between political parties only occurs when certain conditions are met. The cooperative partner is not restricted to the most powerful party. In addition, there is a separating equilibrium in the case of asymmetric information. This leads to the conclusion that the larger difference between the strong type and the weak type of the major political party is, the more common minor political party would cooperate with the weak type of the major political party. Moreover, no cooperation takes place when the minor political party has zero cost in political elections.

One of the most important debates in the distributive politics literature is who receives allocation. Previous studies on Taiwan’s distributive politics have examined predominantly the role played by the president, legislators and the local governments. The distributive strategies of local councilors, however, have been overlooked. Few explain the variations in the amount of resources within councilors’ electoral districts. Using data on local infrastructure expenditures by the 12 Taipei City councilors, this study investigates how rational politicians allocate infrastructure resources in order to maximize the probabilities of reelection, and whether local councilors use resources to reward their core supporters or to expand their support bases. We identify two dimensions—whether to allocate and the amount of money spent by councilors — to the mechanisms of resource allocation. Based on multi-level Tobit regression analysis, we first examine whether councilors tend to favor important sub-constituencies or not. The results indicate that councilors do reward their core supporters with public resources to maintain their electoral bases. How-ever, there is no significant difference in the amount of resources no matter how important the area is. Overall, our findings support the core hypothesis and point out that the allocation mechanism of city councilors should be revised.

The controversy over the authenticity of election polls or the representativeness of samples is the definition of “population” in election polls. Since voter turnout is not absolute, there is a difference between “eligible population” and “voter popula-tion”. Therefore, the demographic consistency between eligible population and voter population with different sample frames in election polls is a topic that has become crucial in survey methodology. The purpose of this study is threefold: (1) explor-ing the error of population coverage through reviewing the evolution of different sampling frames used in election polls in Taiwan; (2) clarifying the implication of eligible population and voter population in election studies and analyzing the 2016 presidential election campaign in Taiwan; (3) analyzing the difference of the polls conducted by TEDS for the 2016 presidential election by using different sample frames, and examining the effect of the weighting adjustment by population param-eters, and exploring its theoretical and practical implications.
This study found that there was a minor difference between the eligible popula-tion and the voter population in the 2016 presidential election in Taiwan. However, the polls from different sampling frames were not completely consistent with the polls from these two populations. The correction effect of the weighting adjustment by the different population parameter on voter turnout, vote gain, and encouraging voter participation is limited. Therefore, to resolve the gap between the poll results and the voting results, the definition of the population might not be critical. The selection of sample frames, the design of questionnaires, the improvement of inter-view skills, and the reduction of interview failures are more important factors.