This study addresses an interesting question on political participation in direct versus representative democracies. That is, are citizens more likely to turn out to vote in direct issue-oriented referendums or in indirect candidate-oriented public office elections? In order to answer this question, this study takes advantage of a rare case of a natural experiment in Taiwan’s 2018 concurrent referendum and local elections.

This study investigates how ideological extremism is portrayed in online and offline communications by using the case of South Korea. We evaluate whether any forms of ideological biases are observed among Twitter users in Korea. We also examine how users are ideologically distinguished from one another in terms of their online political behavior. While most of the existing literature has relied heavily on survey data, we address these questions by means of both survey data analysis and Twitter data analysis using 13,500 tweets during the 2012 Korean presidential election. We find that 1.

Taiwan’s democratization is fundamentally election-driven. This article analyzes how Taiwan’s electoral competition has brought about dramatic changes in party system at the elite and mass levels. On the one hand, electoral opening provides political elite an institutional channel to organize and mobilize the people. On the other hand, the people’s sociopolitical attributes also mold the elite’s perception, calculations and interactions through the electoral process.