This paper presents a number of provisional and incomplete ideas and reflections about the long-term forces that shaped the emergence, consolidation and eventual possible decline of the specific Western political institution of political parties. The text has a limited apparatus of bibliographical notes. I will be presenting three distinct macro-constellations of factors that roughly...
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Volume #6, Number #1
Volume #6, Number #1
This article aims to explain the failure of the DPP government’s anti-nuclear policy. We begin with an overview of the literature on social movements in order to locate the key factors affecting the outcome of collective action. Social mobilization, reform opportunity and political strategy turn out to be significant in this regard. In sum, the success of movement consists in a delicately...
Volume #5, Number #1
Democratization in Taiwan has demanded a more delicate governance system Traditionally isolated administrative body is now encountered pluralistic interference that usually politicizes the policy process essentially. Public administrators, rather than simply rule the public, are now required to design institutions to work with the public in offering public goods. In this paper, I argue that...
Volume #5, Number #1
Why do people need political identity, and what effect does individual learning have on forming her identity preference? Relatively little research has tried to answer these two questions. We address this issue by analyzing the relationship between individual's life cycle and identity preference change. In a formal model of Bayesian updating, we establish that the aging process and...
Volume #5, Number #1
Few concepts have played more central roles in the study of political science than ‘power' and ‘causation'. But students of the subject have fallen into serious ambiguities in recent decades. Some scholars claim that the concepts of power and causation the better.
In view of the present state of affairs in the research area, this article seeks to accomplish three tasks in...
Volume #5, Number #1
As policy problems have become more complex. policy researchers have tried their best to result in thoughtful policy decisions and valuable policy knowledge. To promote the capacity of state’s competitiveness, this policy knowledge should be used and diffused.
Regardless a growth in the volume of policy knowledge in the past decades, most research indicate that governmental policy-...
Volume #4, Number #1
Taiwan’s democratization is fundamentally election-driven. This article analyzes how Taiwan’s electoral competition has brought about dramatic changes in party system at the elite and mass levels. On the one hand, electoral opening provides political elite an institutional channel to organize and mobilize the people. On the other hand, the people’s sociopolitical attributes also mold the elite...
Volume #4, Number #1
In this paper, the 1999 European (Parliament) election has been used to test relevant theories on elections. European elections have been regarded as second-order elections for decades. The 1999 European election is no exception, because it fulfills three defined characteristics of second-order election at the macro level. These Characteristics are (1) lower turnouts than those of general...
Volume #4, Number #1
The phenomenon of divided government－that is, the executive and legislative branches are controlled by different political parties－has become daily reality in Taiwan’s notional and local politics. Yet it receives relatively little attention from a comparative perspective. In the literature, scholars tend to disagree with each other concerning whether divided government leads to policy gridlock...
Volume #4, Number #1
Democratic transition has been one of the most researched topics in the American political science in the past several decades. As Taiwanese politics was transformed in the late 1980’s to democracy, the case also gained wide attention from both the American and local scholars. This paper points out that the literature on democratic transition in Taiwan case, some have followed too closely, or...