Vote-buying has long been a wide -spread phenomenon in elections on Taiwan. It is most commonly practiced by the Kuomintang candidates. This essay analyzes the making and operation of the vote - buying machine of a KMT candidate. The information is collected from participant observation and in-depth interview of the KMT campaigners of different ranks. The article claims that local factions are...
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To modify foreign policy to suit the post-Cold War era, the United States has proposed the strategy of democratic enlargement, replacing the outdated communist containment. This paper analyzes and assesses the theoretical underpinnings and policy practices of the enlargement strategy. To export democratic systems abroad not only coincides with fundamental American values but also reflects the...
Previous explanations of the rapid development of the political opposition in Taiwan after 1986, when the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) announce its establishment, tend to focus on the process of "political elite interactions" between the Kuomintang (KMT) and its challengers. The role of the change of popular support for the opposition were largely ignored. This paper addresses...
Economic exchange between Taiwan and China has been growing rapidly since the mid 1980s. Hong Kong/China has become the largest export market for Taiwan as of October 1995. Meanwhile, China is also the largest recipient of the political interaction that has further complicated the long existing rivalry across the Straits. Moreover, as Beijing openly threatened that it would make use of...
The competition between Chinese identity and Taiwanese identity is the most important and troublesome political problem in today's Taiwan. To understand this significant macro-political phenomenon, I start with a systematic investigation into the relationship between ethnic identity and political cognition of Taiwanese voters. Five central questions are raised. First, what exactly is the...
As the authoritarian regime in Taiwan was transformed into a more democratic system, conflict over national identities has emerged as the most important social cleavage in party competition. Students of nationalism have pointed out that ethnicity lies at the core of modern nationalist movements and nationalist ideology. Nationalism is largely based on collective identity. It commands, in many...
This paper first attempts to explore the increasing descensus of national identity of Taiwanese voters based on electoral survey data. Second, factors that determine individual s orientation in diversified national identity are analyzed and the relationship between descensus of national identity and partisanship as well as partisan vote-choices are also causally modeled. As the survey data...
This essay reviews the idea of community in Western political thought. The classical paradigm is civic republicanism which emphasizes common good. self-rule, and civic virtue as the major characteristics of political life. After the dissolution of the classic theory, there are three paradigms of community in modern political thought—state, civil society, and nation. The modern state is based...