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...

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...

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...

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...