Campaign expenditure has been the most direct and efficient resource for candidates, since it provides the medium for the voters to know the candidates and their policy platforms. The previous literature also shows that the election result is profoundly influenced by the campaign spending. Unfortunately, there have been few related empirical studies in Taiwan prior to the passage of the Political Contribution Act. In this paper, we collect and analyze the campaign spending for the 2008 legislative election from the Control Yuan. Because of reciprocal causality between spending and the election outcome, two-stage least squares (2SLS) is adopted to capture the unbiased relationship between them. The results show that, in addition to the party nomination and the incumbency advantage, the campaign spending influences the election result in three different ways. First, regardless of whether he/she is an incumbent or a challenger, as long as the candidate spends more money, he/she may receive more votes. Second, the spending by the opponents in the same district has a negative impact on others’ votes. Third, the marginal return on the incumbent’s spending is less than that on the challenger’s. In general, the results confirm the traditional campaign expenditure theory based on Jacobson (1978)’s seminal work.

This article intends to provide a selected but cogent depiction of how theories of contemporary hermeneutics have influenced research in political philosophy based on a critical scrutiny of Richard Rorty’s hermeneutic theory and a discussion of the new-developing “interpretive political philosophy,” put forth by another American philosopher Georgia Warnke. Two important concepts, “Conversation” and “Bildung”, borrowed from German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, play pivotal roles in Rorty’s and Warnke’s respective hermeneutic versions when they discuss how to deal with society’s controversy over its basic primary values and goods. This new hermeneutic approach to political philosophy is apparently only in its beginning stages and must both face and try to wrestle with some traditionally important hermeneutical problems on its road to maturity, as, for example, in the questioning of relativism and the criteria for adequacy. However, to the best of our belief, to learn and incessantly mix new elements from other approaches is one way for any discipline to survive as its faces various challenges over time.