Assessing the influence of ideologies on vote choice in an ethnoterritorial context: the case of Taiwan

ABSTRACT

The literature on vote choice in Taiwan has regularly identified ethnoterritorial ideology – preference for independence or unification with China – as the main ideological cleavage in Taiwanese party politics. This paper contributes to the literature by investigating the effects of two more ideological dimensions on vote choice: social and economic. Based on data from the Taiwan Election and Democratization Study (TEDS) for the 2016 presidential and legislative elections, our findings demonstrate that social and (to a lesser degree) economic ideologies do have significant influence on vote choice, though ethnoterritorial ideology remains the primary ideological determinant. Findings were similar for the presidential and legislative elections. On this basis, we make a case for increased attention to social and economic ideologies in future research on vote choice in Taiwan, and we encourage scholars to study Taiwan in comparative perspective with other societies that are divided along ethnoterritorial lines.

KEYWORDS:

• Taiwan
• ideology
• independence
• presidential
• legislative
• identity
• sovereignty

Acknowledgments

Data analysed in this paper were from Taiwan‘s Election and Democratization Studies, 2012-2016 (IV): the Survey of the Presidential and Legislative Elections, 2016 (TEDS2016) (MOST101-2420-H004-034-MY4). TEDS is a yearly project elections and government satisfaction in Taiwan. The coordinator of multi-year project TEDS is Professor Chi Huang (National Chengchi University). More information is on TEDS website (http://www.tedsnet.org). The authors appreciate the assistance in providing data by the aforementioned institute and Prof. Huang. The authors are alone responsible for views expressed herein.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. Taiwan liberalised after the lifting of Martial Law in 1987. The first legislative election took place in 1992 and enabled the KMT to maintain an overwhelming majority of seats. It was followed by the first presidential election in 1996, in which the incumbent president Lee Teng-hui (from the KMT) was elected. Although the DPP won the presidency in 2000 and 2004, the KMT and affiliated parties controlled the legislature until 2016.

2. The exception was Chen Shui-bian’s (DPP) presidency between 2000 and 2008, who was elected with less than a simple majority, and who had to compose with a Blue camp-dominated legislature.

3. We use the term ‘ethnoterritorial’ to refer to ideologies that encompass issues of sovereignty, ethnoregionalism and centre-periphery dynamics.

4. As Cheng and Hsu (1996) point out, the incorporation of a nationalist agenda into the DPP’s charter was not entirely consensual, and was the result of power struggle and bargaining within the party.

5. This number went up to 23 by the end of 2015 (Hickey and Niou 2016, 60).

6.. For more information, see http://teds.nccu.edu.tw/main.php.

7. The NPP was created as a new, supposedly unaligned ‘yellow’ force, in the aftermath of the Sunflower Movement. However, it shares many ideological similarities with the DPP, and can be considered part of Green camp.

8. While attitudes towards gender roles might be regarded as a single component of social ideology, these were the only two questions corresponding to that social dimension that was asked to the respondents. Nevertheless, the association between gender roles and social ideology in general has been established in the scholarship. For studies that link perceptions of gender roles to social ideology, see Liss et al. (2001) and Gidengil et al. (2005). For studies that use a similar operationalisation of social ideology to ours, see Gauvin, Chhim, and Medeiros (2016) and Treier and Hillygus (2009).

9. As in the case of items that correspond to social ideology, the data was also limited in terms of variables that correspond to economic ideology. This question was the only one asked to respondents that could be conceived as measuring economic preferences. However, the economic ideological dimension is generally construed as conveying preferences in terms of taxation and government spending. (see for instance Medeiros, Gauvin, and Chhim 2015; Gauvin, Chhim, and Medeiros 2016).

10. Principal components analysis was also performed to test if the items for the three ideological dimensions loaded onto distinct factors. The results (not reported) demonstrate that although the items for the social ideology formed a distinct, orthogonal dimension, the items for the social and centre-periphery dimensions were not distinct from each other and actually loaded onto the same factor. Thus, the analyses were also performed with a variable that combined the items for economic and ethnoterritorial dimensions; seeing as the Cronbach’s α was quite low, this multi-item scale was composed–after using varimax rotation to improve principal-component score loadings–from factor scores derived using a regression scoring method. The results of the analyses on both types of vote choice are essentially the same as the ones performed with separate economic and ethnoterritorial variables; the combined economic/ethnoterritorial variable demonstrated relatively the same influence as the ethnoterritorial dimension.

11. For instance, Hsieh (2005) found that both highly educated and female voters were less likely to support independence and the DPP. Lin et al. (1996) found that younger voters were more likely to vote on the basis of social justice, and female voters more likely to identify as Chinese, though these relationships had disappeared by the mid-2000s (Lin and Chu 2008). Yu (2005) found an association between education and KMT support in 1995, but this association had disappeared by 2004.

12. The rationale for merging only local languages (Taiwanese, Hakka) with local languages and Mandarin is that, due to the language shift towards Mandarin, households that exclusively use local languages are increasingly rare. For an overview of language shift in Taiwan and a discussion of the relationship between ethnicity, language, identity, ethnoterritorial ideology, and party support, see Dupré (2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jean-François Dupré

Jean-François Dupré is SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa. His research centres on ethnopolitics, democratisation, party politics and cultural recognition.

Mike Medeiros

Mike Medeiros is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on ethnopolitics, nationalism, political psychology, and electoral behaviour.