This article intends to provide a selected but cogent depiction of how theories of contemporary hermeneutics have influenced research in political philosophy based on a critical scrutiny of Richard Rorty’s hermeneutic theory and a discussion of the new-developing “interpretive political philosophy,” put forth by another American philosopher Georgia Warnke. Two important concepts, “Conversation...
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Volume #14, Number #2
Volume #14, Number #2
This paper seeks to examine why some countries have abolished the death penalty while others choose to keep it, given their popular opinions overwhelmingly favoring this tool to pursue justice. Taking Taiwan and Singapore as cases, this study demonstrates different approaches toward this controversial issue. In contrast to Singapore’s self-confidence on exercising its sovereignty, Taiwan has...
Volume #14, Number #2
Campaign expenditure has been the most direct and efficient resource for candidates, since it provides the medium for the voters to know the candidates and their policy platforms. The previous literature also shows that the election result is profoundly influenced by the campaign spending. Unfortunately, there have been few related empirical studies in Taiwan prior to the passage of the...
Volume #14, Number #1
In recent years, the U.S. Supreme Court’s treatment of commercial speech has undergone transformations, from total non-protection under the First Amendment to less protection or even to qualified protection. However, why is commercial speech entitled to only less protection? The
transformations indicate that commercial speech may not be less valuable than political speech according to...
Volume #14, Number #1
Voters are nested in electoral districts and are therefore often affected by the macro-level characteristics of the districts. By incorporating both the individual-level and district-level variables, we construct a two-level model to analyze voters’ voting choices on the single-member-district ballot in the 2008 legislative election. We find that indeed some theoretically important variables...
Volume #14, Number #1
Contrary relations between utility and beauty are conceived by Han Fei: one is that the two are incompatible and utility should take the place of beauty, while the other has to do with redefining beauty in light of utility, and thus not only making the two compatible, but also having the former provide support to the latter. How these contrasting relations between utility and beauty constitute...
Volume #14, Number #1
Whether people identify themselves as Taiwanese or Chinese has been an issue of importance since the beginning of democratization in Taiwan. This article explores whether the strength-of-association statistic between education and self-identity among Taiwanese people has changed over the past 15 years during which Taiwan has undergone substantial political and social change. If the statistic...
Volume #14, Number #1
In a democracy that features elections as the main mechanism for its representative government, the interests and values of minority, disadvantaged and non-mainstream groups in the pluralistic society can never be fully pursued and reflected. On the other hand, under the increasing influence of globalization, the importance and jurisdiction scope of the agencies which are capitalist in nature...
Volume #13, Number #2
By searching the Journal Citation Reports of the Social Sciences Citation Index database, this study investigates the characteristics and compares the differences in citation data for 83 political science journals. The journal citation data that are explored include times cited, the impact factor, the immediacy index, citing half-life, cited half-life, the self-citing rate (synchronous self-...
Volume #13, Number #2
The purpose of this study is to probe into the effects of party turnover in 2000 on the behavior of legislators in terms of law-making and constituency service. The findings of this study are as follows. First of all, in terms of law-making, the evidence clearly shows that legislators of both the Kuomintang and Democratic Progressive Party change their mode of behavior regarding legal...