Actual and perceived polarization on independence-unification views in Taiwan

ABSTRACT

The rise of political polarization and its consequences for democracies have attracted much attention. But why the growing polarization? We argue that the main reason lies in the fact people act on the basis of not only their self-identities but also their perception of others, especially those viewed as the opposing group. In Taiwan, independence or unification with China is no doubt the most fundamental political cleavage. We therefore focus on the nature, sources, and consequences of such polarization in the mass public. This study (1) defines and operationalizes both perceived and actual polarization on independence-unification issue at individual level, (2) explores which individual characteristics such as Taiwanese-Chinese identity, partisanship, and media exposure are differentially related to the two types of polarization, and (3) compares consequences of perceived and actual polarization for citizens' affective polarization. We find that both an individual's Chinese–Taiwanese identity and partisanship contribute most to higher levels of perceived polarization, which in turn penetrates into social life and is significantly associated with negative emotions toward child's potential interparty marriage. The key implication of our study is that to prevent the self-perpetuating upward trend of political polarization, we should understand the determinants of the associated misperception.

KEYWORDS:

• Political polarization
• actual polarization
• perceived polarization
• Taiwan
• survey

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Blue camp refers to KMT and its allies, while green camp refers to DPP and its allies.

2 Data analyzed in this paper were obtained from Taiwan Institute for Governance and Communication Research (TIGCR) 2019: Political Polarization Survey (TIGCR-PPS 2019) (Huang & Chang, 2020). The principal investigators of the multi-year project were Professor Chi Huang (National Chengchi University) and Research Fellow Chingching Chang (Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, Academia Sinica). More information is available on the TIGCR website (https://tigcr.nccu.edu.tw/). The authors appreciate all assistance in providing data by the Institute and individuals aforementioned. The authors alone are responsible for views expressed herein.

3 We thank an anonymous reviewer who points out that some respondents may not answer the inter-party marriage question owing to embarrassment and thus may cause exceeding number of missing data. Actually, the total number of missing data for the inter-party marriage question is only 55, among them 30 said they ‘have no children,’ 22 responded ‘don’t know’ and only three refused to answer. The 25 respondents in the last two categories might feel embarrassed by the question but account for only 1.22% of our sample of two major party followers.

Table

4 The sample of DDP identifiers consisted of only nine respondents leaning to Chinese identity. The three categories of Chinese identity were dropped because excessively few observations would lead to unstable estimation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ministry of Education: [Higher Education SPROUT Project].

Notes on contributors

Chi Huang

Chi Huang (黃紀) is a University Chair Professor of Political Science, Director of the Taiwan Institute for Governance and Communication Research (TIGCR), and Research Fellow of the Election Study Center at National Chengchi University, Taiwan. His research interests focus on survey research, quantitative methodology, electoral systems and voting behavior. He has co-authored or co-edited seven books and published many articles in leading international and Taiwanese journals, including APSR, AJPS, JOP, CPS, Electoral Studies, Party Politics, Asian Survey, and Taiwanese Political Science Review. He founded the Taiwan's Election and Democratization Study (TEDS) inter-university survey project in 2000 and served as the TEDS Coordinator for 20 years.

Tzu-ching Kuo

Tzu-ching Kuo (郭子靖) is a research assistant of the Taiwan Institute for Governance and Communication Research (TIGCR). His research interests focus on survey research and data science. He is the fieldwork supervisor of TIGCR's five-year panel survey, and the development engineer of TIGCR's computer assisted personal interviewing system (CAPI). He also assists to develop and manage the Taiwan's Political Geographic Information System (TPGIS) for building the aggregate electoral data archive of Taiwan's elections.