This research found that the status of legislators brought about different patterns of media coverage during the 9th Legislative Yuan (2016-2020). It focuses on the news coverage by legislators and examines the patterns of the media coverage engendered by them. A news report database was adopted from the Congressional
Library of the Legislative Yuan and context analysis was conducted. This approach divided legislators’ reports into three types: “Professional News,” directly related to the duties of legislators; “Political News,” related to extra political positions (ex.party whips) or current political affairs; and “Private News,” related to the personal life and non-political issues of the legislators. Differences in the patterns of the news coverage of legislators could have an impact on their re-election outcome.
This study found that media coverage was influenced by both the legislators and the media. Factors included the motivation or pressure by legislators for media exposure as well as the news value from the perspective of media operation and selection. The factors affecting the amount of media presence for legislators
can be roughly divided into external structural conditions and personal messaging strategies. External structural factors refer to the selection of news materials and framework by journalists, while individual conditions include the gender, seniority,
experience in cadre positions of individual legislators, and political structure and executive and legislative relations, among others. We found that the specific status of a legislator often led to a specific pattern of media coverage; however, more extensive media exposure did not necessarily lead to successful re-election.During the 9th Legislative Yuan, “Professional News” was the factor most likely to have a positive impact on
re-election success, while “Political News” and “Private News” had little impact on the re-election success of legislators.

With the rapid advancement of IT and the changing times, Taiwan has been facing increasing coverage error in single-frame telephone surveys (whether by landline or cell phone) in recent years. Dual-frame telephone surveys can effectively reduce this deficiency. However, there is still no consensus on how to weight dualframe telephone samples in Taiwan.
This study uses data from a 2020 dual-frame telephone survey to compare several popular weighting approaches. The impact of these approaches on the variance and bias in both single-frame and dual-frame samples, as well as in overlap and screener designs, is discussed. Additionally, this study examines the differences between the estimates of the non-proportion dual-frame sample allocation to provide practical recommendations.
The results indicate the following: (1) if the sample allocation of the dual-frame samples is in nearly equal proportions, minor differences occur in the weighting
loss between the overlap and screener designs. Only the post-stratified estimating procedure reveals some differences in the estimates with other designs. (2) If the sample allocation of the dual-frame samples is in unequal proportions, such as one single-frame national sample and the others are only 1/3 or 1/2 of the former, then after calibration, the weighting loss is only slightly increased, and these approaches produce only tiny differences in the calibrated estimates between the combinations.

The Taiwan Provincial Council is the subject of this study. Based on the KMT's nomination strategy and election results in the two provincial councilor elections in 1972 and 1977, it revisits and revises the KMT's factional substitution policy of the 1970s.
During the 1972 local elections, the KMT aggressively promoted factional replacement in the election of magistrates, mayors, and Taiwan Provincial Councilors. The KMT eliminated political figures with local factional backgrounds on a large scale in the name of promoting young talents. With respect to the Taiwan Provincial Councilors, the replacement was intended to eliminate Taiwan Provincial Councilors elected prior to 1968 in order to suppress the inter-county local faction that existed in the Taiwan Provincial Council at the time. Most Taiwan Provincial Councilors who had served for more than two terms were not re-elected, thereby generating a significant generational shift in the makeup of Taiwan Provincial Council. The KMT’s control over the Taiwan Provincial Council was thus strengthened. Despite
a significant reduction in mobilization power due to the KMT's suppression of local factions, the party's political base was unaffected by the absence of a strong national opposition at the time.
During the 1977 local elections, the KMT continued to suppress local factions while giving support to KMT members who had no factional background. The local factions were no longer as effective as they had been during the local elections in 1972. Except for a few counties and cities, no local factions abandoned the KMT, and their capacity for mobilization improved. However, factions outside the party successfully mobilized over 7% of new voters who had not voted previously. This resulted in unprecedented setbacks for the KMT, including the defeat of several Taiwan provincial councilors from local factions. Taiwan has since formed an opposition capable of mobilizing the entire country.

A growing body of cross-national studies has examined the ideological con-gruence between citizens and political parties and found that those citizens whose is ideology close to the winning party tend to be satisfied with democracy in their country. We extend the causal story of ideological congruence and satisfaction with democracy to Australia and New Zealand. As we estimate the effects of various socio-psychological factors on citizen satisfaction, we highlight the effect of perceived accountability and ideological congruence. We find that both factors contribute to satisfaction with democracy in New Zealand and Australia. Our empirical evidence not only confirms the extant literature but also suggests that perceived accountability has a larger influence in both democracies that use different election systems. This result has to do with the possibility that majoritarianism and proportional representation may produce coalition governments that locate ideology at the median voter. Therefore, democratic satisfaction primarily depends on if the government being controlled by its citizens.

The bitter rivalries that used to occur only among political elites have now reached the everyday lives of the mass public. In particular, the results of presidential elections have been driven as much by affective conflict between partisans as by policy debates. The present study explores affective polarization in Taiwan through negative partisanship. Data from presidential elections between 2004 and 2020 provide evidence for the effect of negative partisanship on election results. The study found that starting in 2012, there has been a rapid increase in negative views among partisans in both main parties toward the opposing party. In the 2020 presidential election, more than 40% of both Kuomintang (KMT) and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) supporters showed negative partisanship towards the opposing party. Furthermore, supporters of both parties had the lowest ever favorability scores for the opposing party. Even when traditional party identification and support for independence or reunification are controlled, negative partisanship still has significant explanatory power. The decision to vote for a candidate from a particular party in presidential elections depends not only on one’s long-term identification with that party but also on whether one harbors a strong negative opinion towards the opposing party.

This paper employs qualitative data collected through focus group and in-depth interviews during the period of 2000-2021., The proposed research aims to explore how Taiwanese people define and interpret “Taiwanese”, “Chinese” and “both Taiwanese and Chinese (dual identities)”, and also to clarify people’s identity target and boundary. The result shows that Taiwanese people’s identity contents are continuous and concentrated in the Taiwan- centered “we group” consciousness. The primordialist ties with China persists, yet most of them are regarded as objective facts and cannot be generated or converted into the “we group” consciousness. The major change is that the Chinese consciousness has almost disappeared from popular discourse. Our data also shows that many Taiwanese people have treated Taiwan (Republic of China) as the “we group”, and China (People’s Republic of China) as the “they group”. This finding indicates that Taiwan identity has reached the stage of national identity in terms of boundary setting. The gradual clarity and elevationed consciousness of national identity impliesy that Taiwan has the tendency of reaching a collective identity.

Populism is deeply embedded in a democratic society, and a thin ideology composed of many different concepts affects people’s attitudes toward political elites and their vote choices. Based on voters’ populist inclination, this paper analyzes the voting in the recall of the mayor and the by-election of Kaohsiung City in 2020. In the two different voting periods, the voters’ populist inclination was affected by their demographic background and political attitudes.
This study uses two sets of data to analyze the voting for the recall and the by-election. One is “A Voting Study of Kaohsiung City’s Third Mayoral Recall” hosted by Tsai Chia-hung and conducted by the National Chengchi University’s Election Study Center, and the other is “Taiwan’s Election and Democratization Study, 2020-2024(I): Kaohsiung City Mayor By-Elections: Telephone Interview hosted by Chen Luhui” conducted by the National Chengchi University’s Election Study Center. We found that during the recall period, populism was affected by the age and education of the voters. During the by-election period, the populist inclination was affected by voters’ party identity, Taiwanese/Chinese identity, education and occupation. In addition, the populist inclination of Kaohsiung voters did not affect their decision to vote for recall. Their satisfaction with Han Guo-yu was the main reason for voters to vote for the recall and in the by-election, voters with lower populist inclination voted for Chen Chi-mai, but it did not influence voters to vote for Li Mei-jhen. Although Han Guo-yu helped Li Mei-jhen in the campaign, it did not affect the voters’ choice.

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.