For ordinary citizens, political knowledge serves as a prerequisite for meaningful political participation. Thus, types of political knowledge that are easy to know and easily learned over time among voters are of particular importance to those who long for an informed citizenry. Three research questions are asked. The first is whether or not a specific type of political knowledge is easily known and easily learned over a period of time among respondents. The second concerns the extent to which a knowledge gap exists between different population segments measured by education, and how this gap exists when it comes to different types of political knowledge. The third question is whether campaign activities have the function of helping the low educational group to improve in political knowledge and ultimately close up the knowledge gap. The research findings are such that both the U.S. president’s name and the Taiwan premier’s name are the surveillance fact, and the former is easy fact and the latter is the easily learned fact. On the other hand, knowledge about constitutional interpretation is relatively hard to pick up given that it has the nature of taught fact. Moreover, if given time to digest, the low educational group is likely to catch up with the high educational group when it comes to the surveillance fact. In this case, the knowledge gap tends to disappear. Last, but not least, campaign news on TV and televised presidential debates help the less educated to learn and serve as another possibility for closing up the knowledge gap. This study is based on one-shot cross-sectional analyses as well as conditional fixed-effect logistic regressions for its empirical examination.
Regular Issue
Volume #18, Number #2
Published in December, 2014
Will climate change lead to militarily severe civil conflicts? In recent years climate change and civil conflict scholars have extended their discussions to whether or not climate change increases civil war onset and a general consensus has been reached. However, it is still not clear if climate change (such as temperature and rainfall fluctuations) also leads to bloodier results if civil conflicts have begun. Using 130 civil conflicts between the period 1960~2006, and temperature deviation as the proxy variable of climate change, this paper examines if climate change affects civil conflict severity. Empirical findings confirm that when the difference between the average temperature of the year civil conflicts start and that of the past 50 years increases, civil conflicts become bloodier. Possible reasons are economic and political concerns triggered by resource scarcity because of climate change. This forces both the government and belligerent groups to fight harder in order to maintain or change the current situations, respectively. The final section of this paper offers policy implications and directions for future research.
In this article we apply Rodrik’s (2011) theoretical framework of “The Political Trilemma of the World Economy” to investigate whether Garrett’s (1998) finding about the OECD countries’ experience of globalization can still hold in Taiwan. We find that Taiwan’s globalization process is different from that in the OECD countries. After the collapse of the Bretton Woods System, in “The Trilemma” framework, the OECD countries walk along the path of “global governance,” successfully mitigating the negative impact of globalization on society by international integration and international policy coordination. Different from the OECD countries’ experience, China precludes Taiwan from joining global governance; Taiwan’s main social cleavage precludes politicians from paying attention to domestic compensation issues; and Taiwan’s small scale domestic market precludes the government from limiting the degree of globalization. Therefore, Taiwan gradually walks along the path of “golden straightjacket.” Walking along this path, Taiwan maintains its economic growth and competitive ability mainly by reducing the cost of production and transaction in ways such as cutting down the domestic compensation and social welfare. As a result, the government sacrifices the losers of globalization and pays the price of neglecting the negative impacts of globalization on society. This study also demonstrates that it is a structural predicament that precludes Taiwan from choosing the path of “global governance.” Therefore, as long as the status quo remains so, it is very difficult for Taiwan to unilaterally switch the path from “golden straightjacket” to “global governance” simply by domestic political reform or policy change.
To assess interparty completion in democratic politics, Dalton (2008) constructed the “party polarization index” based on a left-right ideology. The partisan divide between the pan-Blue and pan-Green camps in Taiwan has been sharp and acute since the 1990s. This observed reality contradicts the stable and modest prediction based on Dalton’s index. To explain the difference, it is hypothesized that public opinion in Taiwan rests not on a left-right ideological continuum but on the issue of independence versus unification. This study utilizes cognitive interviews and survey data conducted in Taiwan to examine its citizens’ perceptions of left-right ideology in an attempt to adjust Dalton’s party polarization index.
This research shows that most of Taiwan’s citizens are unfamiliar with, and sometimes misunderstand, the meaning of left-right ideology. The majority of the respondents cannot place themselves or identify the major parties’ positions on a left-right ideological continuum. The result indicates that Dalton’s party polarization index is inappropriate to examine Taiwan’s interparty competition due to the validity issue in measurement. By replacing the indicator of left-right ideology with that of the respondents’ positions on the unification versus independence issue, this study shows that Dalton’s index can better assess interparty competition in Taiwan. The implication of the findings from this study is that the index construction needs to adapt to different political contexts.
Elections and voting behavior have been enduring subjects in studying democracies. Electoral stability and volatility not only shape the faith of individual political parties, but also the evolution of the party system as a whole. Hence topics related to party support and voting choices, both methodological and substantive, have attracted attention from scholars around the world.
This study focuses on the voting choices in Japan’s bicameral system under Junichiro Koizumi’s governance in the early 21st century. By employing the panel data from the Japanese Election Study (JES III), we analyze four waves of House and Councilor elections from 2001 to 2005. By comparing Mixed Logit (MXL) and Generalized Mixed Logit (GMXL) models, we find that the GMXL model is the most appropriate tool in analyzing Japanese longitudinal voting behavior because it can simultaneously take into account the ‘individual’s preference heterogeneity’ and ‘scale heterogeneity across individuals’ of party identification. The results of the GMXL model indicate the significance of the party feeling thermometer, party identification, and Koizumi’s leadership in influencing Japanese voting choices while controlling the bicameral institution variable. More importantly, although the GMXL analysis confirms many findings in the previous literature on party identification in influencing voting behavior, such as how the voters behave in supporting the LDP-Koumei Coalition, the GMXL model further captures both preference and scale heterogeneity in the Japanese voters’ utility function, i.e., some voters behave with greater variation while others behave more consistently. These results not only enrich the existing Japanese electoral literature, but also contribute to the methodology of studying voting choices in general.
Elections and voting behavior have been enduring subjects in studying democracies. Electoral stability and volatility not only shape the faith of individual political parties, but also the evolution of the party system as a whole. Hence topics related to party support and voting choices, both methodological and substantive, have attracted attention from scholars around the world.
This study focuses on the voting choices in Japan’s bicameral system under Junichiro Koizumi’s governance in the early 21st century. By employing the panel data from the Japanese Election Study (JES III), we analyze four waves of House and Councilor elections from 2001 to 2005. By comparing Mixed Logit (MXL) and Generalized Mixed Logit (GMXL) models, we find that the GMXL model is the most appropriate tool in analyzing Japanese longitudinal voting behavior because it can simultaneously take into account the ‘individual’s preference heterogeneity’ and ‘scale heterogeneity across individuals’ of party identification. The results of the GMXL model indicate the significance of the party feeling thermometer, party identification, and Koizumi’s leadership in influencing Japanese voting choices while controlling the bicameral institution variable. More importantly, although the GMXL analysis confirms many findings in the previous literature on party identification in influencing voting behavior, such as how the voters behave in supporting the LDP-Koumei Coalition, the GMXL model further captures both preference and scale heterogeneity in the Japanese voters’ utility function, i.e., some voters behave with greater variation while others behave more consistently. These results not only enrich the existing Japanese electoral literature, but also contribute to the methodology of studying voting choices in general.