Previous studies on voting participation used to model individuals’ utilities and duties as the forces driving their participation. It is assumed that people maximize their utilities when they turn out. In the 2004 referendum, there were many controversies as to how to exercise direct democracy as well as fierce partisan battles. It is thus necessary to analyze the determinants of voting in...
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Volume #11, Number #1
Volume #11, Number #1
The 1995-1996 Taiwan Strait Missile Crisis was the most serious military and diplomatic conflict among the U.S., China and Taiwan in recent years. The worst possible scenario during the crisis was that China would wage a war with Taiwan that might drag the U.S into the war. The best possible scenario was that the Chinese military exercise was just a bluff. Why did a rising power (China) adopt...
Volume #11, Number #1
There are two competing approaches, namely, the “Asian exceptionalism” and “Universalism,” in regard to the political economy of the Asian tigers. The former argues that authoritarianism based on the “Asian values” has performed better than the democratic regimes in terms of influencing the course of economic development and income distribution. By contrast, following the democratization of...
Volume #11, Number #1
Substantial research has been done in recent years to examine Taiwanese citizens’ sense of political efficacy. Previous literature assumes that the causal direction runs from efficacy to participation. No research has been conducted analyzing how political participation affects Taiwanese citizens’ sense of political efficacy. Neither is there any inquiry examining the impact of electoral...
Volume #10, Number #2
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...
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...