Researchers of partisan voters have been assuming that there is a solid difference between “independent” voters and partisan voters (including leaners). This is hardly the case in the Taiwan context, a democracy with a two-party presidential system, where over 40 percent of voters are partisans, but claim to be independent in most telephone surveys.

Unlike studies using party identification to examine citizens’attitudes toward political parties, this essay introduces the concepts of party necessity and party trust to explore citizens’ attitudes toward a political party. Three assumptions are provided and tested based on the existing literature and Taiwan’s experiences. First, in a democracy, the majority of citizens confirm that a party is a necessity while maintaining a widespread distrust toward parties. Second, the citizens’ evaluations of party functions will have effects on party necessity.

This paper tries to uncover the most significant factor determining the outcome of the Taipei Mayoral Election in 1994. The previous research has discovered that the voting decision of the electorate in Taiwan was to a large extent determined by party affiliation. In addition, the ruling KMT has gained a lions share of partisanship among the electorate. This situation did not change much in the election of 1994. This paper tries to answer how the DPPs candidate was able to win the election under this circumstance from the perspective of candidate factor.

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 current state of divided national identity in Taiwan? Second, who tends to self-perceive as Taiwanese or Chinese, or both?