Electoral accountability refers to the mechanism that people are able to use their votes to award or punish incumbent governments based on their policy outcomes and political performance. Conventional studies focusing on electoral accountability in Latin America mainly address the relations between governments’ economic performance and incumbents’ vote share. However, their conclusions are...
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Volume #10, Number #2
Volume #10, Number #2
On April 24th 2003, Taipei Municipal Heping Hospital, where the first Taiwanese SARS (serious acute respiration syndrome) hospital infection occurred, was shut down abruptly to halt the outbreak of SARS infections in Taiwan. Being compelled to work and without necessary protection against SARS, some hospital staff broke the quarantine order by getting through the blockade. Based on the right...
Volume #10, Number #2
To measure party positions should be a theory-guided empirical research, even though it is only about to measure a variable. This research starts with explaining why approach and theories are important to the selection of variables and how to measure them. Secondly, the content analysis developed by Manifesto Research Group (MRG) and a variety of obtrusive methods of measurements are...
Volume #10, Number #2
The incumbents in a democracy tend to manipulate the economy by adopting expansionary fiscal policy to stimulate short-run expansion during electoral periods. By doing so, the macroeconomic performance is affected by the election and it is so called the political business cycle. In order to test whether policy instruments are affected by the election or not, this paper focuses on the electoral...
Volume #10, Number #2
The construction of theories about migration has long been the goal of scholars from the disciplines of economics, demography, and sociology. Theories aimed at explaining ‘why the phenomena of international migration occur,’ ‘why individuals make the choice of migrating,’ and ‘why the flows of migration fluctuate the way they do’ have tremendously improved our understanding of migration. The...
Volume #10, Number #1
This study intends to explore the relationship between democratic administration and network governance, and to utilize “units of analysis” to compare and contrast the types of the implications of network governance in four countries including America, Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands. The main argument is that the theory of network governance may serve as a bridge between democracy and...
Volume #10, Number #1
This paper tries to understand the role of judicial independent reform in the process of the breakdown of the Taiwanese clientelist system. The author argues that the decrease of coercion diminishes the ability of the authoritarian party to control and protect its brokers or local politicians. Democratization decreases the role of coercion in politics. The patrons cannot easily use coercion or...
Volume #10, Number #1
The operation of a political regime or a business entity involves the principal-agent problem. Checks and balances are the theme in the political arena, while management and controlling are the routine in the business world. To ensure that the ministers or the executive officers perform the desired functions, a monitoring scheme may be helpful. The crux of the issue is the lack of trust and...
Volume #10, Number #1
When researchers analyze time series survey data, it is of importance to distinguish random sampling error from volatility of time varying. This study aims at introducing a statistical method of Samplemiser developed by U.S. politics scientists for distinguishing genuine movements in public opinion from random movements produced by sampling error. In this work, we first explain the...
Volume #10, Number #1
Survey research in Taiwan almost always focuses on studying public opinion in the national level. Due to the potential small n problem for less populous sub-geographic units, scholars have not utilized national survey data to estimate public opinions in any local level (e.g., county, town, or village). To overcome this sample size limitation, we use a method combining the multilevel modeling...