The study of the causes of voter’s split-ticket voting has gained its prominence following the increasingly emergence of divided governments in America. These literatures are having merits both in quality and quantity. This article firstly reviews the competing perspectives for the causes of voter's split-ticket voting. It also addresses the issue of cross-national applications of these perspectives. It indicates that, given the unique political institutions and party system, American literatures find themselves difficult applying to other countries. Redefining the relevant concepts and connotations become necessary. This article then takes the 2002 · survey data of the elections for city mayor and councilors of Kaohsiung as an example to study voter's split-ticket voting. In particular, owing to peculiar party system in Taiwan, it examines voter's split ticket voting based on individual party and the "pan-blue vs. pan-green" party coalition. It points out that, in Kaohsiung, party coalition model performs better in explaining voter's behavior than the traditional party label. Also, this case study shows that the direction of party identification, the strength of party identification, and voter's past voting patterns are significant for voter's split-ticket voting in both party coalitions. The significances of other factors, such as voter's age,voter's provincial origins, sense of check-and-balance are different when they are applying to different party coalitions. In the concluding remarks, this article summarizes the outcomes and limitations of this study. It also readdresses the importance to formulate a research agenda for the study of the causes of voter's split-ticket voting in Taiwan.
Regular Issue
Volume #8, Number #1
Published in June, 2004
For the past four decades, Almond and Verba’s pioneering work, The Civic Culture, has remained one of the most popular books in political science, despite many criticisms. Indeed, the continuing popularity of The Civic Culture in the academic community is evidence of its groundbreaking quality and subtlety in treating culture as an independent variable. However, the number of criticisms and the lack of alternative paradigms paradoxically reflect the poverty of originality and progress in this field. The key question not only lies in the methodological problem of variable formation, but also originates from the expedient treatment of culture as a residual category. In this article, I examine two major debates in political culture studies and argue that culture should be treated as an implicit logic internalized in people's mind as common knowledge. Finally, this article will demonstrate how to formulate political culture as a useful independent variable by using survey data from Pakistan and Morocco.
With two elections in the same locale, this paper studies the importance of vote-buying to the Kuomintang political machine. The author argues that the role of vote-buying in the KMT political machine is similar to that of lubricating oil in an engine. Without vote-buying, the KMT political machine can not function well.
In the successful election of 1993, there were seven serious obstacles faced by the KMT on the way to building a successful political machine: (1) the scarcity of brokers, (2) the potential incompetence of
brokers, (3) factionalism within clientelistic networks, (4) overlaps in factional and broker-level networks, (5) embezzlement, (6) unpredictable managers of mobilizations, and (7) limited funds for vote-buying. Forty-five percent of the voters who accepted the money for vote-buying did not vote for the KMT candidate. However, the obstacles'importance was less than vote-buying.
In the 2000 presidential election, the KMT documents showed that the party used many brokers to mobilize voters. However, without votes-buying, these people in the KMT broker list would not have regarded themselves as brokers, and did not know how to mobilize voters.
The study of “split-ticket voting” has become a non-negligible topic in political science recently as the upsurge in ticket-splitting has led to a major impact on U.S. politics, at both the national and state levels, by making divided governments normal rather than exceptional. In fact, split-ticket voting occurs not only in presidential democracies; voters in many parliamentary democracies such as Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Japan, and Israel also split their tickets in elections because of various ballot structures of the electoral systems. However, previous studies on this subject mainly focused on American voting behavior, and little academic research has been explored on the impact of electoral systems on the cause of ticket-splitting.
This study investigates the institutional factor of "split-ticket voting", and tries to categorize four types of ticket-splitting. Moreover, based on eight countries'electoral data, this study analyzes the political impacts of four types of ticket-splitting on voting behavior and campaign strategy.